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”.
