Abstract:
This study has aimed to compare the effects of two types of form-focused instruction, i.e. de-contextualized focus-on-forms instruction versus meaning-centered contextualized focus-on-form instruction, on the development of grammatical knowledge of Iranian high-school students. Two groups of male high-school first graders participated in this study. One group was taught through de-contextualized deductive grammatical explanation, while the other group received enhanced input and contextualized grammar instruction embedded in meaning-centered activity based on dialogs. The results indicated that de-contextualized instruction as it is normally practiced in high-school contexts failed to promote successful use of the auxiliaries do, does, and did in a written production test. In contrast, adding the design features of meaning-based contextualization and enhanced input to instruction did result in better performance on a written production grammar test involving the use of the auxiliaries under study. In the delayed posttest, contextualized meaning-based instruction appeared to have a durable effect, but the effect was not significant enough to warrant any claim for the durable superiority of this form of instruction.
Machine summary:
"Although the interface positions adopted by some authors, that is, explicit knowledge can become implicit knowledge by practice (Anderson, 1983; DeKeyser, 1998, cited in Doughty & Williams), is itself in doubt, still the question of interest here is whether explicit DFoFs instruction can amount to any type of linguistic knowledge which enhances learners' successful performance on grammatical tests/tasks, let alone the higher-level question of its proceduralization.
This study poses the argument that unless there are opportunities for learners to actively engage in contextualized meaning-focused activities which represent, as closely as possible, real-life language use situations, teaching grammatical structures in a de-contextualized way will lead nowhere, as is the case with teaching English at high-school level in Iran.
Inspired by this framework, the present study was an empirical attempt to investigate whether planned CFoF instruction in the order of (a) provision of enhanced input through written dialogs, (b) elicited negotiation of meaning, (c) teacher- or student-initiated consciousness-raising, and (d) explicit instruction will prove a better alternative to the current de-contextualized explanation-based analysis of grammatical structures DFoFs. In other words, it aimed at providing empirical evidence about the inefficiency of the current explanation-based approach to teaching English grammar in high-school classes in Iran.
The present study has been an attempt to investigate whether contextualizing grammatical points in meaning-focused activities CFoF would prove a better alternative to the commonly adopted de-contextualized approach to the teaching of grammar DFoFs. In other words, it aimed at providing empirical evidence for the inefficiency of the current explanation-based approach to teaching English grammar in high-school classes in Iran."