Focus on Form in Task-based Language Teaching

Abstract

Given adequate opportunities, older children, adolescents, and adults can and do leam much of an L2 grammar incidentally, which focusing on meaning, or communication. Research shows, however, that a focus on meaning alone (a) is insufficient to achieve full native-like competence, and (b) can be improved upon, in terms of both rate and ultimate attainment, by periodic anention to language as object. ln crassroom settings, this is best achieved not by a retum to discrete-point grammar teaching, or what I call focus on forms, where classes spend most of their time working on isolated linguistic structures in a sequence predetermined externally by a syllabus designer or textbook writer. Rather during an otherwise meaning-focused lesson, and using a variety of pedagogic procedures, learnens' attention is briefly shifted to linguistic code features, in context, when students experience problems as they work on communicative task, i.e., in a sequence determined by their own internal syllabuses, current processing capacity, and learnability constraints. This is what I call focus on form. Focus on form is one of several methodological principles in Task-Based Language Teaching.