There is general agreement that accuracy is an important classroom language goal, but against the explicit rule explanation, fluency has been the major advancement of communicative approaches and ‘focus on form’ appear to fulfill both requirements and reach the middle ground between accuracy and fluency.
Before reading this article, I was a bit doubtful about the Focus on Form. Naturally drawing attention to the form without distracting original communicative intent? How to arise the target form incidentally, but also naturally and contextually? This technique sounded very appealing to me, but at the same time, ‘too ideal’ at first.
As the outset of FonF study, ESL science content-based class was conducted for 2 weeks in order to determine the effectiveness of incidental focus on form in the context. The instructional tasks were designed to elicit spontaneous and planned production of all aspects of the past tense, both orally and in writing. The negative evidence was provided by repeating to draw attention followed by RECASTS. The teacher repeated a phrase containing an incorrect past verb, putting the error in focus with different stress and intonation to induce students’ noticing. Also, the teacher required students to answer spontaneous questions during the discussion in class. When she found some errors from a student, the teacher had the whole class repeat the correct form at times. Lastly, the teacher videotaped students’ presentation about their labs and in the following class, the teacher asked the students to repeat the errors of the past tense while they were watching the tape together. Also, on students’ writing, the teacher gave both negative evidence in the form of a recast and content-based comments.
Effectiveness ?
Since it was the science class, there was evident awareness on the past tense among students and they began to self-correct before the teacher recasted and some of students even peer-corrected each other. Therefore, the use of past tense was natural and accordingly, it was incidental for teacher to provide the focus on form. However, the recasts was to adjust to be immediate and brief and not to be an object of the lesson. As the result, the FonF(the treatment group) showed significant and large gains in the past tense on both the written and the oral measures, compared to the control group. This article mentioned that the FonF technique in content-based class demonstrated both the feasibility and effectiveness. While reading this article, it fulfilled most my curiosity and interest about the effectiveness of the focus of form. The FonF class sounds so effective that I want to take this class and it is refreshing that the FonF overcomes the problems that the current communicative language class has.
Feasibility ?
It should be, and must be a loooot of work to do for teachers. First, the teacher must keep track of what students are saying throughout the class. The teachers should literally focus on forms, content, and manage the classroom at the same time. It must involve a great deal of requirements, like providing recast, asking spontaneous questions, having the whole class repeating someone’s errors and giving feedback on writing as well, apart from videotaping student’s presentation. Plus, the teacher should be able to adjust the amount of corrections- not too many corrections but they should be brief and immediate. It sounds that the teacher should be trained, experienced and very skillful.
In Korea?
I wonder the 'FonF in content-based' can be applied to Korean students. For example, is it possible to teach middle and high school students with the FonF techniques in content-based class? First of all, where to find the decent teachers who can teach their subjects in English?
One of my friends gives tutoring as a part time job. She majored in Math and Business and had lived in the states for about 9 years. She teaches math in English and makes good money. It is because it is hard to find someone who is good at both English and other subjects. In some of international schools in Korea, students take all classes in English, of course all of students can speak English fluently. What about the students in regular schools? Some of students might get interested and show significant improvement in English and gain the knowledge of specific subjects, but most of them might rather lose their interest both in English and the content. I believe that focus on form in content-based lesson works as long as the students have reached the certain level in their English proficiency, not to mention, teachers should be able to conduct their subjects in English first of all.
No comments:
Post a Comment