Focus on form 1
- 1. Focus on Form PROPOSE BY: MICHAEL HUGH LONG IN 1998
- 2. Michael Hugh Long (1945-2021) Michael Hugh Long was an American psycholinguist. • Professor of Second Language Acquisition at the University of Maryland, College Park. • Introduced the concept of focus on form, which entails bringing linguistic elements (e.g., vocabulary, grammatical structures, collocations) to students’ attention within the larger context of a communicative approach in order to anticipate or correct problems in comprehension or production of the target language • Usually credited for introducing the Interaction Hypothesis, a theory of second language acquisition which places importance on face-to-face interaction.
- 3. Focus on Form that some aspects of an L2 require awareness and/or attention to language form, and further, that implicit learning is not sufficient for SLA mastery
- 4. Why Implicit learning is not sufficient for SLA Mastery? No specific instruction. Implicit knowledge lies below the level of consciousness and is difficult to verbalise Implicit Learning Strategy involves…
- 5. Michael Long proposed Focus on Form approach Long calls for a Focus On Form within a Communicative or Meaning-based Approach to Language Teaching, such as Task- based or Content-based Language Teaching.
- 6. Long hypothesizes that “a systematic, non-interfering focus on form produces a faster rate of learning and (probably) higher levels of ultimate SL attainment than instruction with no focus on form.
- 7. Input enhancement Sharwood Smith (1993) suggests that visual enhancement (color-coding, under lining, boldfacing, enlarging the font) be made to written instructional texts in an attempt to make certain features of the input more salient.
- 8. Input enhancement Input enhancement can also apply to speech. For instance, phonological manipulations such as oral repetition might help learners pay attention to grammar structures in the input.
- 9. Phonological Manipulations Phoneme Manipulation is “playing” around with the sounds in a word to make a new word. For example, the teacher may say a word “pot” and then ask the students to change the /p/ to /h/ to create a new word.
- 10. Input Flooding Input Flooding is a second method of drawing attention to a form by flooding meaningful input with the target form.
- 11. Input Flooding Example: - The teacher introduces a word such as "in." - I am in the room; we are in the room; the birds are in the air; the birds fly in the air; there is something in the water; when we swim, we get in the water; when I put my shoes on, I put my foot in the shoe; when I bake a cake, I put it in the oven; you are writing in your notebook, etc.
- 12. Comprehensible/Output Production. It forces students to switch from semantic to syntactic processing of input in order to produce the desired output.
- 13. Example: An early learner who hears the sentence: That black dog has just bitten the young girl on the leg. might only process: dog…bit…girl…leg The learner can probably get the meaning from these content words, but this means a lot of the input can be ignored. That black dog has just bitten the young girl on the leg.
- 14. Swain argued that students also needed to produce language, because only this would push the student to produce the correct grammatical structures and extend their use of vocabulary. It would force the learner to put words into order and ‘glue’ the meaning words together with function words – to ‘grammarize’ the sentence.