The Impact of Form-Focused Instruction and Consciousness-Raising Activities on L2 Learners’ Acquisition of Grammatical Gender in French

Abstract

Second-semester university students (N=60) participated in this study investigating the effects of form-focused instruction on accurate grammatical gender assignment by L2 learners. The treatment drew students’ attention to a series of noun endings that reliably predicted grammatical gender (noticing), encouraging them to group nouns with similar endings and explicitly state their gender (awareness). Students then assigned gender to pictured nouns and solved a series of riddles (controlled-practice). Analyses of pretest, immediate- and delayed-posttest results showed a significant increase in the ability of students in the experimental classes to correctly assign grammatical gender on a written fill-in-the-blank test.