The debate on form-focused instruction

Abstract

An interest in investigating the effect of instruction on interlanguage development prompted me to conduct a study on a small group of adult migrant learners of English. As a first step, the learners were assessed for their stage of syntactic development. This assessment showed that a structure-do-fronted questions – had not been acquired by some of the learners but was one for which they were syntactically ready. Because questioning is an important and complex speech act, the learners were then given instruction which focused their attention on do-fronting. The follow-up assessment indicated that instruction can be successful because the learners acquired do-fronting. The study supports the claim that form-focused instruction can make a difference. It also lends weight to Pienemann’s claim that the effectiveness of instruction depends on whether a structure is learnable for an individual learner. The study shows that form-focused instruction can provide an innovative linguistic focus to communicative language teaching and give important assistance with the second language acquisition of the learners.

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