Option 1: Focus on forms

Option 1 is today considered the traditional approach, although it has not always been viewed that way. Course design starts with the language to be taught. The teacher or textbook writer divides the L2 into segments of various kinds (phonemes, words, collocations, morphemes, sentence patterns, notions, functions, tones, stress and intonation patterns, and so on), and presents these to the learner in models, initially one item at a time, in a sequence determined by (rather vague, usually intuitive) notions of frequency, valency, or (the all-purpose and question-begging) "difficulty". Eventually, it is the learner's job to synthesize the parts for use in communication, which is why Wilkins (1976) called this the synthetic approach to syllabus design. It is not just the syllabus that is synthetic in this approach, however. Learners are typically encouraged to master each linguistic item in synthetic syllabuses one at a time, to native speaker levels using synthetic materials, methodology and pedagogy. Synthetic syllabi (lexical, structural, and notional-functional, for example), are accompanied by synthetic "methods" (Grammar Translation, ALM, Audio-Visual Method, Silent Way, Noisy Method, TPR, etc.), and by the synthetic classroom devices and practices commonly associated with them (e.g., explicit grammar rules, repetition of models, memorization of short dialogs, linguistically "simplified" texts, transformation exercises, explicit negative feedback, i.e., so-called "error correction", and display questions). Together, they result in lessons with what I call a focus on forms. Focus on forms lessons tend to be rather dry, consisting principally of work on the linguistic items, which students are expected to master one at a time, often to native speaker levels, with anything less treated as "error", and little if any communicative L2 use.

1. There is no needs analysis to identify a particular learner's or group of learners' communicative needs, and no means analysis to ascertain their learning styles and preferences. It is a one-size-fits-all approach. This usually results in teaching too much - some language, skills and genres learners do not need - and too little - not covering language, skills and genres they do need. This is discouraging to students and inefficient.
   
   
2. Linguistic grading, both lexical and grammatical, tends to result in pedagogic materials of the basal reader variety - "See Spot run! Run, Spot, run!" - and textbook dialogs and classroom language use which are artificial and stilted - "Hello, Mary. Hello, John. Are you a student? Yes, I'm a student. What are you doing? I'm reading a book, etc." - captured nicely in David Nunan's example of simplified Shakespeare - "Stab, Hamlet, stab!", and in classroom input that is functionally restricted and "impoverished" in various ways. In other words, a focus on forms often leads to what Widdowson (1972) called language usage, not to realistic models of language use. "Simplification" is also self-defeating in that it succeeds in improving comprehension by removing from the input the new items learners need to encounter for the purposes of acquisition. (Input elaboration can usually achieve comparable comprehension gains without this disadvantage and without bleeding a text semantically. See, e.g., Long and Ross, 1993.)
   
   
3. Focus on forms ignores language learning processes altogether or else tacitly assumes a long discredited behaviorist model. Of the scores of detailed studies of naturalistic, classroom and mixed L2 learning reported over the past 30 years, none suggests anything but an accidental resemblance between the way learners acquire an L2 and the way a focus on forms assumes they do, e.g., between the order in which they learn L2 forms and the sequence in which those forms appear in externally imposed linguistic syllabuses. Synthetic syllabuses ignore research findings such as those showing that learning new words or rules is rarely, if ever, a one-time, categorical event, and that learners pass through developmental stages, as well as the fact that many of the target items students are expected to master separately are often inextricably bound up with other items. As Rutherford (1988) noted, SLA is not a process of accumulating entities. Yet that is precisely what a focus on forms assumes.
   
   
4. Leaving learners out of syllabus design ignores the major role they will play in language development, nonetheless. Research by R.Ellis (1989) and Lightbown (1983), for example, shows that acquisition sequences do not reflect instructional sequences, and while results are more mixed here (see Spada and Lightbown, 1993), work by Pienemann (1984 and elsewhere), Mackey (1995), and others suggests that teachability is constrained by learnability. The idea that what you teach is what they learn, and when you teach it is when they learn it, is not just simplistic, it is wrong.
   
   
5. Despite the best efforts even of highly skilled teachers and textbook writers, focus on forms tends to produce boring lessons, with resulting declines in motivation, attention, and student enrollments.
   
   
6. The assertion that many students all over the world have learned languages via a focus on forms ignores the possibility that they have really learned despite it (studies of language acquisition in abnormal environments have found the human capacity for language acquisition to be highly resilient), as well as the fact that countless others have failed. A focus on forms produces many more false beginners than finishers.