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Form-focused Instruction in the Mainstream Classroom: Effects on the Grammatical Development of Adolescent English Language Learners
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Abstract:
Educating English language learners (ELLs) has increasingly become a challenge for schools outside major cities in Canada. ELLs in such contexts are swiftly integrated into mainstream classrooms, often without targeted language support. One way of providing support is through form-focused instruction (FFI) – an approach to language instruction in which learner attention is focused on language form during meaning-based activities. Although FFI has proved beneficial for the development of linguistic accuracy in a variety of second and foreign language contexts, its effectiveness for high school ELLs in mainstream classrooms has not been experimentally investigated. In this study, 18 participants enrolled in a secondary social studies course received FFI on two linguistic structures – passive and simple present - for 10 to 15 hours over a 15-week period. A time-series research design was used to compare the students’ performance on three pretests before the intervention with their progress at the midpoint, immediately after the intervention, and six months later. Students completed six linguistic measures at each test session: four production tasks – an oral (OPT) and written task (WPT) on each structure - and two receptive tasks – an aural (AGJ) and written (WGJ) grammaticality judgement task testing both structures. The results of the group’s overall performance immediately after instruction indicated limited improvement with significant gains observed on only two of the language measures, the passive OPT and the simple present AGJ. However, an analysis of individual and group performance based on students’ pretest knowledge of the target features (low, mid, high) indicated movement into higher levels of performance over time on the passive tasks. Learners’ performance on the simple present tasks showed less consistent patterns of change. The results are discussed in terms of the challenges of attending to language and content simultaneously. ; Ph.D.
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Keyword:
0515; Adolescent; English language learners; Form-focused instruction; Grammatical development; Mainstream; Secondary
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URL: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/77405
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Positive evidence, preemption and parameter resetting in second language acquisition
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