Second Language Learning and Language Teaching

Focus on form (FonF)
An issue in recent research is how focus on form contributes to the student’s
learning. As Mike Long (1991: 45–6) puts it, ‘focus on form . . . overtly draws stu-
dents’ attention to linguistic elements as they arise incidentally in lessons whose
overriding focus is on meaning or communication’. Several ways exist of drawing
the students’ attention to grammar without actually explaining grammar expli-
citly. Grammatical items or structures may be brought to the students’ attention by
some graphic or auditory device, provided it does not distort the patterns of the
language – stressing all the grammatical morphemes in speech to draw attention
to them, for example, would be a travesty – ‘IN THE town WHERE I WAS born
lived A man WHO sailed TO sea’. In L1 research James Morgan (1986) showed that
adults used pauses and intonation to provide children with clues to the structure
of the sentence so that they could tell which noun was the subject of the sentence,
that is, indicating that the sentence ‘The cat bit the dog’ has the structure seen in
(The cat) (bit the dog) not (The cat bit) (the dog).
SLA research by Joanna White (1998) drew the students’ attention to grammat-
ical forms such as pronouns by printing them in italic or bold face, for instance,
‘She was happy when she saw her ball’. However, she found variation between
individuals rather than a consistent pattern. The minor problem is that italic and
bold letter-forms are used for emphasis in English and, however much the stu-
dents’ pronouns might improve, it could have bad effects on their knowledge of
the English writing system. Jessica Williams and Jacqueline Evans (1998) con-
trasted two structures, participial adjectives such as the familiar confusion
between ‘He is interesting/interested’ and passives such as ‘The lake was frozen’.
One group heard language with many examples of these structures; another group
was given explicit explanation of their ‘form, meaning, and use’; a third had no
special teaching. The group who were given explanations did indeed do better
than the other groups for the adjectives, but there were only slight effects for pas-
sives. Hence there seems to be a difference in the extent to which grammatical
forms lend themselves to focus on form: participial adjectives do, passives do not.
Of course, not too much should be made of the specific grammatical points used
here; some accounts of English, after all, put participle adjectives like ‘interested’
and passives such as ‘frozen’ on a continuum rather than seeing them as entirely
different. Nevertheless, the point is that all the parts of grammar cannot be treated
in the same way. Because we can help students by clearing up their confusions
over past tense endings, we cannot necessarily do the same with relative clauses.
The teaching applications of FonF are discussed at greater length in Chapter 13 as
part of task-based teaching. The overall feeling is that judicious use of focus on form
within other activities may be useful, rather than full-scale grammar explanation.
Having once seen a teacher explain in English the differences between ‘must’ and
‘have to’ to a class of Japanese children for 45 minutes, I can only agree that explicit
grammar instruction is hugely ineffective; even as a native speaker, I cannot remem-
ber the differences she explained. The focus on form (FonF) argument combines sev-
eral different threads, all of which are fruitful for teachers to think about: how they
can highlight features of the input, subtly direct attention to grammatical errors
through recasting, and slip grammatical discussion in as support for other activities,
all of which are sound classroom practice. None of them, however, is novel for prac-
tising teachers who have probably always from time to time stressed words to draw
the students’ attention, paraphrased the students’ mistakes, or given a quick gram-
matical explanation during the course of a communicative exercise. The overall
Learning and teaching different types of grammar