Abstract:
This study investigated the effectiveness of reactive incidental focus on form (FonF) for each learner with regard to different linguistic categories in meaning-oriented EFL classes. To this end, 30 hr of meaningful interactions of upper-intermediate EFL learners were audio-recorded in 2 free discussion classes. Instances of reactive incidental focus-on-form episodes (FFEs), where teachers offer on-the-spot corrective feedback to their learners’ linguistic mistakes, were extracted from the data. Furthermore, individualized tailor-made posttests were designed out of self-reported novel FFEs per learner. Results of learner-customized immediate and delayed posttests indicated that this type of instruction led to a substantial improvement in learning the focused language points. Achievement rates were found to be high in both test administrations. This efficacy was, however, more noticeable with regard to grammatical and phonological FFEs. Results reveal that reactive incidental FonF could enhance explicit knowledge of L2 learners both in the immediate context based on uptake rate and in the long run, as the findings from the immediate and delayed posttests demonstrated.
Machine summary:
Incidental Focus on Form in Free Discussion EFL Classes1 Fartash Rasaee2, Javad Gholami3, & Gholam-Reza Abbasian4 Received: 20/02/2017 Accepted: 06/07/2018 Abstract This study investigated the effectiveness of reactive incidental focus on form (FonF) for each learner with regard to different linguistic categories in meaning-oriented EFL classes.
This efficacy was, however, more noticeable with regard to grammatical and phonological FFEs. Results reveal that reactive incidental FonF could enhance explicit knowledge of L2 learners both in the immediate context based on uptake rate and in the long run, as the findings from the immediate and delayed posttests demonstrated.
e. , reactive incidental FonF in this case), as it measured the effectiveness of this approach to teaching in developing EFL learners’ knowledge of grammatical, lexical, and phonological features of the English language through immediate and delayed posttests tailored out of noticed FonF instances by each learner in a free discussion class.
Retention Rate of FFEs With Regard to Linguistic Categories in the Long-Term (View the image of this page) Regarding the phonological FFEs, although the learners could pronounce fewer phonological FFEs correctly in the sentence-level test than in the word-level one, the difference between them was not significant, x2 (1, n = 896) = 1.
At the first glance, that the learners could perform better with regard to the grammatical and phonological FFEs may seem to indicate the higher effectiveness of reactive incidental FonF in developing their grammatical and phonological knowledge than the lexical ones.
This study corroborates and complements the findings of previous research in that it deals with different linguistic categories and indicates the positive effects of incidental corrective feedback on learning these language forms.