Abstract:
This study investigated the effects of planned focus-on-form instruction (pFFI) on developing oral grammatical accuracy in Iranian English EFL learners. To this end, 60 lower-intermediate EFL learners studying English in a private English language institute in Tehran, Iran, were randomly assigned to two classes. Both classes received a task-based instruction on grammatical points elicited in oral production of English sentences with the only difference that one class, the experimental group (N=30) had a pFFI instruction (i.e., the target grammatical structures selected in advance), and the other class, the control group (N = 30), had a task-based instruction without any focus on planned grammatical structures. Learners’ oral performance was observed in their answers to pictorial cues in the pretest and posttest. The results of the study revealed that although both groups significantly improved in their oral performance in terms of grammatical accuracy, pFFI instruction was more effective on the experimental group since they significantly outperformed the control group.
Machine summary:
Planned Focus-on-form Instruction in Task-based Language Teaching: The case of EFL learners’ oral grammatical accuracy performance Elham Parvaneh, M.
com Abstract This study investigated the effects of planned focus-on-form instruction (pFFI) on developing oral grammatical accuracy in Iranian English EFL learners.
Due to the problems with the traditional methods and also the ones with meaning-based approaches, the challenge is to find the best way to bring form instruction to second language classes (Nassaji, 2016; Nassaji & Cumming, 2000), while the main focus is on meaning.
Adding focus-on-form to meaning-based contexts Focused task aims to push the learners to process some linguistic features receptively or productively as a result of performing communicative activities.
Based on the above-mentioned arguments, the present study aimed to channel the learners’ attention towards the rules of the language through focus on form in task-based language teaching in order to investigate its effect on developing the learners’ oral grammatical accuracy.
Does planned focus-on-form task-based instruction have any significant impact on the development of grammatical accuracy of Iranian EFL learners’ oral performance at lower- intermediate level of language proficiency?
The sixty learners were divided into two groups randomly to determine the effect of the technique of planned focus-on-form in task-based language teaching.
The findings of this study are also supported by DeKeyser (2015) and Anderson (2017) who believe that current interest in focus-on-form is motivated by the findings of naturalistic acquisition studies suggesting that when classroom second language learning is entirely experiential and meaning-focused, some linguistic features do not develop to target like level.