Option 3: Focus on form

Both the extreme interventionist focus on forms and non-interventionist focus on meaning have problems, which often lead to further pendulum swings, as advocates mistakenly see flaws in the rival position as justifications for their own. There is a viable third option, however, which attempts to capture the strengths of an analytic approach while dealing with its limitations, and which I call focus on form (not forms) (Long, 1991, to appear; Long and Robinson, in press). Focus on form refers to how attentional resources are allocated, and involves briefly drawing students' attention to linguistic elements (words, collocations, grammatical structures, pragmatic patterns, and so on), in context, as they arise incidentally in lessons whose overriding focus is on meaning, or communication, the temporary shifts in focal attention being triggered by students' comprehension or production problems. The purpose is to induce what Schmidt (1993, and elsewhere), calls noticing, i.e., registering forms in the input so as to store them in memory (not necessarily understanding their meaning or function, which is a question of how new items are organized into a linguistic system, and which may not occur until much later, and certainly not necessarily with metalinguistic awareness). In other words, to deal with the limitations of a pure focus on meaning, systematic provision is made in Option 3 for attention to language as object. Unlike in Option 1, however, which forms are targeted, and when, is determined by the learner's developing language system, not by a predetermined external linguistic description. Focus on form, therefore, is learner- centered in a radical, psycholinguistic sense: it respects the learner's internal syllabus. It is under learner control: it occurs just when he or she has a communication problem, and so is likely already at least partially to understand the meaning or function of the new form, and when he or she is attending to the input. These are conditions most would consider optimal for learning - the psycholinguistic equivalent of worker control of the means of production.

Focus on form should not be confused with 'form-focused instruction'. The latter is an umbrella term widely used to refer to any pedagogical technique, proactive or reactive, implicit or explicit, used to draw students' attention to language form. It includes focus on form procedures, but also all the activities used for focus on forms, such as exercises written specifically to teach a grammatical structure and used proactively, i.e., at moments the teacher, not the learner, has decided will be appropriate for learning the new item. Focus on form refers only to those form-focused activities that arise during, and embedded in, meaning-based lessons; they are not scheduled in advance, as is the case with focus on forms, but occur incidentally as a function of the interaction of learners with the subject matter or tasks that constitute the learners' and their teacher's predominant focus. The underlying psychology and implicit theories of SLA are quite different, in other words. Doughty and Williams capture the relationships among all three approaches very well in their forthcoming book (Doughty and Williams, in press-a): "We would like to stress that focus on formS and focus on form are not polar opposites in the way that 'form' and 'meaning' have often been considered to be. Rather, a focus on form entails a focus on formal elements of language, whereas focus on formS is limited to such a focus, and focus on meaning excludes it. Most important, it should be kept in mind that the fundamental assumption of focus-on-form instruction is that meaning and use must already be evident to the learner at the time that attention is drawn to the linguistic apparatus needed to get the meaning across." (Doughty and Williams, in press-b, p. 4)