The Effectiveness of Focus-on-Form Instruction in Facilitating Accuracy in Oral Performance

• Main Authors: Hsiao-i Tien, 田孝一
• Other Authors: Jyu-fang Yu
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/38326r

碩士 === 東海大學 === 外國語文學系 === 102 === Long (1988) proposed focus-on-form (FonF) instruction as a balanced combination of conveying meaning and noticing form simultaneously during authentic communicative activities. His proposal was based on the observation of the advantage of instructed learning over uninstructed learning and in view of counter-productive effect of instruction built around isolated linguistics forms. Although FonF instruction has been widely accepted and adopted, it has provoked controversies over its effectiveness in terms of gains on accuracy because of the theoretical limitations of the input processing capacity. Some researchers (Poole, 2005a; Sheen, 2003) even urged a careful second thought on the implementation of this type of instruction in English teaching classrooms worldwide. The purpose of this research study aimed to examine the effectiveness of focus-on-form instruction on the participants’ performance of oral accuracy. Moreover, this study also highlighted the comparisons on the contribution of input enhancement and explicit grammar instruction on the growth of accurate oral usage of the target grammatical form, the English comparatives. The participants of this experimental research were three intact classes of elementary school students (N=97) in grade 4. They were randomly assigned as Group A, B and C. Groups A and B both received focus-on-form instruction at the first stage of the treatment in addition to their regular English classes. Then, Group A was given input enhancement while Group B, explicit grammar instruction. Group C served as the control group that received regular English classes only. All the individual students took a pretest, two separated posttests and a delayed posttest in a one-on-one interview format. Each interview took approximately 5 minutes. The whole experiment process lasted for ten weeks. The paired-samples t-test, independent-samples t-test, and one-way ANOVA were utilized to analyze the test results. Analysis of accuracy gains for classroom instruction indicated that focus-on-form instruction on Groups A and B induced statistically significant improvement on the performance of the participants’ use of the target grammar form on the first posttest. Further, the two kinds of treatments on Group A and B, input enhancement in contrast to explicit grammar instruction, generated comparable contributions to focus-on-form instruction on the second posttest. The effect of instruction on both Groups A and B retained for three weeks and the results on the delayed posttest were statistically indistinguishable. Group C that received no additional instruction on the target form, however, made no significant progress throughout the experiment.