Exploring the impact of Focus on Form instruction in teaching grammar to ESL undergraduates in the Sri Lankan context

Abstract

A preponderance of ESL undergraduates find it challenging to develop their grammatical knowledge to express themselves accurately and fluently in speech or writing despite the years of learning grammar with the use of form-focused instruction and meaning-focused instruction at their secondary schools. This action research thus explored the impact of using the twin-track approach, Focus on Form (FonF) instruction in teaching grammar to ESL undergraduates to determine whether this approach can address issues the undergraduates experience in terms of developing and implementing grammatical knowledge. In this pursuit, the first-year undergraduates of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences of the University of Ruhuna were selected as the sample for the study. The FonF instruction was then implemented to the experimental group and the control group experienced traditional methods for a semester. A pretest and posttest design was utilized to obtain quantitative data for the study whilst semi- structured group interviews were administered to the experimental group to accumulate qualitative data to explore the impact of the intervention. It was discovered that the FonF instruction has positively contributed to the grammar development of the undergraduates. The priming effect acquired by the undergraduates through consciousness-raising tasks and the corrective feedback provided by the facilitator in terms of the perceived problems with production and comprehension has profoundly facilitated the process of their interlanguage development. The experimental group prefers the FonF instruction to traditional methods since it has enabled them to witness their own progress and confidence in the production of the target language irrespective of the inevitable developmental errors. Moreover, the scores obtained for the pretest and posttest ensured the aforementioned progress gained through the FonF instruction that has aided the undergraduates to draw their attention to linguistic code features in communicative contexts in enhancing their grammatical development and production.