A Comparison of the Effectiveness of Focus-on-form and Meaning-focused Instructions in the English Classroom

Abstract

One of the rather recent topics which preoccupied the language teaching circles for a while is the Focus-on-form (FOF) instruction originally proposed by Long (1991). Many language teachers, educators, and researchers ”praised it as if it were the miracle method they had always been searching for” (Poole, 2005, p. 47) and many research projects have tried to prove it being more effective than meaning-focused (MF) instruction and some researches also attributed the effectiveness of FOF instruction to the way it is performed and the personality factors of learners and teachers. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of FOF and MF instruction in EFL settings especially for the beginning learners who were in a more crucial need of developing a grammatical competence in L2. Therefore, the effectiveness of FOF and MF instruction was examined to see if any significant difference existed in the effect of meaning-focused and focus-on-form activities on Taiwanese junior high school students' learning grammatical points in the English classroom. The researcher chose two classes randomly and assigned them as two groups: experimental and control groups, and the instructors used FOF instruction in the experimental group and MF instruction in the control group to teach the same grammar unit (relative clauses) for a four-week period. After that, a reading test was conducted to see if any significant difference occurred in the scores of these two groups. However, the result did not reach the statistic significance, but the greater means of the experimental group on the total and the two subsections of the test imply that FOF instruction may bring about more satisfactory results. The study implied the confirmation of previous research which has shown the effectiveness of FOF over MF instruction in grammar teaching of the Taiwanese junior high school English class.