CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF FOCUS-ON-FORM AND CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK IN COMMUNICATIVE LANGUAGE TEACHING (Effects on Second Language Learning)

By Sitti Fatimah Saleng

It has long been accepted by practitioners and academics alike that Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) is the preferred way ESL should be taught (Savignon, 1991). Studies done in the 1980s and 1990s showed that French immersion in Canada, one of the best examples of true CLT as it exists today (Krashen, 1985). It is also supported by Shah (2003) that form-focused feedback is successful in drawing the learner’s attention to certain linguistic forms within the context of performing communicative activities.

This article investigates the effects on form-focused instruction and corrective feedback provided in the context of teaching program that were based on principle of communicative language teaching (CLT). It examines the relationship between classroom instruction and interaction and the learners’ developing second language ability (especially grammatical accuracy). The researchers recommend that including form-focused activities within communicative classroom settings may bring about better language learning outcomes.

The research question in this article, are there other differences in learner language outcomes that may be related to differences in instruction? And the result shows that, yes there are. Different instruction or subject focus and time allocation bring the significant influence to result of students’ performance, as the micro-level analysis showed that the teachers at those four classes almost never taugh grammar lessons and rarely presented rules about the target language. Even within a grammar focus, teacher differed in the aspect of grammar to which they reacted. For example, teacher in class 1 had a particular concern to the  students’ use of forms there is/there are.

There are some weakneses also in this research, as stated in the conclusion, the classroom observation data are limited and there is no claim that only the instructional variables differ between the classes; The profiles of the learner language in these four classes are also quite different, eventhough the students had very similar exposure to English both in their extensive ESL program and their limited contacts with English outside school; The differences are also related to the type of instruction provided. For example, in class 1, the most form-focused instruction was provided. The learners were more accurate in their use of progressive –ing. While in other class, the learner might accurate in the use of plural –s, etc. Students in class 4 had the lowest accuracy on all the features examined in the analysis of spontaneous language samples. The teacher in this class was the only one who virtually never focused on grammar. Teacher only focus on vocabulary difficulties that students were experiencing. Therefore, we could not judge students that they have low ability in English, because we can see the fact that in one side, students in this class have very good comprehension skills as shown in listening and reading comprehension test. They performed better than both class 1 and 2 (grade 5).

So, it can be concluded that “different istructional given to students, different performance they would have”.