Dr. Michael Long is Professor in the Masters of ESL and Ph.D. in Second Language Acquisition at the University of Hawaii where he teaches courses in SLA, classroom research and Task Based Language Teaching. He has published a number of books and over 100 articles. He serves on the editorial boards of Studies in Second Language Acquisition Language Teaching Research , and Estudios de Linguistica Aplicada and is co-editor of the Cambridge Applied Linguistics Series.

"Focus on form (see Figure 1) is an approach to teaching grammar vocabulary, collocation, pragmatics, and more, through helping students map forms, functions and meaning, in context, and with the timing of treatment determined by the learner's internal syllabus. Students' attention is shifted briefly to linguistic features just as, or immediately after, problems with them arise in production or comprehension, incidentally, in lessons whose overriding focus is on communication. In other words, in an attempt to deal with the limitations of an exclusive focus on meaning, focus on form includes systematic provision for attention to language as object. Unlike focus on formS, however, which form-meaning mappings are targeted, and when, is determined by the learner. In a very real sense, grammar teaching is under learner control.

With focus on form, help with a language item is given just when conditions for learning should be optimal (see Figure 2).

• The learner has a communicative need. An obvious example is when students get stuck for lack of a vocabulary item or some grammatical coding device required to complete a task. Knowing what they are trying to say also means they will already understand the meaning and function when the new form is supplied by the teacher, by another student, or in the pedagogic materials, as we will see in the videotaped pairwork activities later.
  
• The learner is likely to be motivated to learn something new, and so is also likely to be attending to the input.
  
• Since meaning is at least partially understood, often completely understood, finite attentional resources are freed up, allowing him or her to focus on the new form.
  
• Moreover, the new form is context-embedded, and an item for which a learner is more likely to be developmentally ready.
  

According to some writers, focus on form can be proactive or reactive, designed to preempt a problem or to deal with one that has arisen. For a variety of reasons, my own preference is for reactive focus on form, e.g., in the form of recasts, delivered as implicitly as possible, while still being effective.

Focus on form is a methodological principle in Task-Based Language Teaching, a potentially universal design feature of language courses. The pedagogical procedures by which the principle is realized, conversely, are certainly not universal. In fact, they are local, particular, the teacher's preserve, and should vary systematically, depending on the linguistic items and kinds of learners involved. Doughty & Williams (1998b) review 11 devices for delivering focus on form (see Figure 3), ranging from least to most intrusive, from input flood to the Garden Path technique.

If focus on form is delivered to a whole class of students at a time, I think it should not be for every problem that moves, but only after a teacher has observed errors that are systematic, pervasive, and remediable. In practice, I think that a good deal of focus on form should occur at the individual, not the whole-class, level, e.g., in responses to homework assignments or as students work on tasks in pairs or small groups. I believe that it is at this micro-level of relatively private student talk in small groups that so much language acquisition takes place. It is to individual learner syllabuses that we need to respond."