Form-Focused Instruction



Form-Focused Instruction

Introduction

The term form-focused instruction explains any pedagogical practice taken on by teachers of second language (L2) with the objective of drawing attention of their students to language form (Collins, 2012). Long (1991) defines focus on form as drawing students' interest to linguistic elements, as these elements come up in lessons incidentally wherein prime focus is on communication or meaning. The key focus of attention in form focussed instruction is on meaning, where the attention to form originates out of activity that is meaning-centered, derived from a task's communicative performance (Ellis et. al. 2002). It can be of two types: planned or incidental (Ellis, 2006). This article seeks to provide a brief introduction on “form focused instruction”.

Discussion

The term “form- focused instruction” is used to mention any incidental or planned instructional activity that is meant to provoke language learners to concentrate to linguistic form. Therefore, as a cover term, it serves for several other terms that form in the current literature- “focus on form” (Long, 1991), “analytic teaching” (Stern, 1990), “negotiation of form” and “corrective feedback/ error correction”.

Focus on form can be planned, when attention is paid to a predetermined grammatical structure and it can be incidental, when attention to form is not predetermined but occurs as the activity develops. Both of these types of focus on form may occur, as lessons, at times, are unpredictable. What teachers do in class is a response to what typically they have previously planned; however, they also may come across elements (e.g. grammatical structures) that they have not anticipated as part of their lesson plan.

Ellis et al (2002) present two options to accomplish focus on form: reactive and pre-emptive. According to these authors, the reactive focus on form occurs, when the teacher or another student that responds to an error, ...