Some useful sources on focus on form

There is much more to be said about these issues, but I will close by indicating four useful new sources on focus on form. The first two are comprehensive reviews of laboratory and classroom studies of form-focused instruction (including focus on form) by the British psychologist, Nick Ellis (1995), and by Nina Spada (1997). Ellis concludes that the research shows a blend of explicit instruction and implicit learning to be superior to either one alone. Spada, similarly, finds broad empirical support for the view that form-focused instruction (including focus on form) is beneficial for SLA. Third, two Ph.D. students at the University of Hawai'i, John Norris and Lourdes Ortega, are currently (Fall, 1997) conducting a statistical meta-analysis of all studies of focus on form to date. Their findings are expected in the next few weeks (your prayers are welcome).The fourth concerns a crucial issue for teachers and researchers alike, namely pedagogical choices in focus on form (see Figure 3). Catherine Doughty and Jessica

Williams have recently completed editing a book for Cambridge University Press: Focus on form in classroom second language acquisition, due out in February, 1998, which contains several new empirical studies documenting the efficacy of focus on form with children and adults in a variety of classroom settings. One chapter in the book, written by the editors themselves (Doughty and Williams, in press-c), focuses on the six decisions and options for teachers and materials designers in this area:

1. Whether or not to focus on form,
2. Reactive versus proactive focus on form,
3. Choice of linguistic form,
4. Explicitness of focus on form,
5. Sequential versus integrated focus on form, and
6. The role of focus on form in the curriculum.

In meticulous detail, Doughty and Williams review the options available to teachers at each juncture, and what the research conducted at Georgetown, Hawai'i, Urbana-Champaign, Chicago Circle, OISE, Michigan State, Concordia, McGill, Penn, Edith Cowan, Bangor, Thames Valley, and elsewhere has to say about those options. With regard to decision (4), for example, since a major research issue concerns the relative utility of explicit or implicit procedures for different target structures and different kinds of learners, Figure 3, one of several from the Doughty and Williams chapter, ranks 11 procedures for delivering focus on form from least to most obtrusive, and reviews the research findings on each: input flood, task-essential language, input enhancement, negotiation, recast, output enhancement, interaction enhancement, dictogloss, consciousness-raising tasks, input processing, and the garden path technique. Besides providing a service to teachers and researchers alike, this work by Ellis, Spada, Norris and Ortega, and Doughty and Williams, offers the basis for a serious research program on the role of grammar in TBLT and other forms of communicative language teaching for the next decade.