Differential effects of explicit form-focused instruction on morphosyntactic development

Abstract

This study explores whether and to what degree explicit form-focused instruction (FFI) facilitates the use of morphosyntactic forms in second language oral production and also whether it has differential effects on morphosyntactic forms with different linguistic variables. Twenty-seven university-level Chinese EFL participants were randomly assigned to a control group and an experimental group. While the control group watched a television episode in English, the experimental group completed two form-focused activities (rule review and self-correction) designed to draw their attention to noun plural, past tense, and third-person singular in English in their oral production. All participants completed oral production pre- and post-test measures, the results of which showed that explicit FFI promoted the use of the target forms and that the facilitative effects were dependent on the complexity and regularity of the morphosyntactic forms. Regular (as opposed to irregular) and more complex morphosyntactic forms appeared to benefit more significantly from explicit FFI.