Research on form-focused instruction in immersion classrooms: implications for theory and practice

Abstract

This article presents a comparative analysis of five quasi-experimental studies involving close to 1,200 students, ranging in age from 7 to 14, in 49 French immersion classrooms in Canada – a content-based instructional context where learners develop high levels of communicative ability yet demonstrate a levelling-off effect in their grammatical development. The studies investigated the effects of form-focused instruction on four areas known to be difficult for anglophone learners of French: perfect vs. imperfect past tense, conditional mood, second-person pronouns and grammatical gender. Findings suggest that effective form-focused instruction in immersion contexts, at least with respect to interlanguage features that have reached a developmental plateau, includes a balanced distribution of opportunities for noticing, language awareness and controlled practice with feedback. Less effective instructional options overemphasise negotiation for meaning in oral tasks where message comprehensibility and communication strategies circumvent the need for learners to move beyond the use of interlanguage forms.

Higher Education Institutions without Foreign Language Continuity

“…According to experts, grammar still holds a central position in language teaching (R. Ellis, 2006) and may foster more subconscious FL learning and improve learners' interlanguage (Nassaji, 2000;Norris & Ortega, 2000;Doughty, 2003;Robinson, 2003;Lyster, 2004a;Lyster, 2004b;R. Ellis, 2006;Klapper, 2006;Dörnyei, 2009).…”

The Effect of Oral Corrective Feedback on Article Errors in L3 English: Prompts vs. Recasts

“…In other words, it does not interrupt learners' conversation (Oliver, 1995;Long, 1996;Doughty & Varela., 1998;Doughty, 2001;Leeman, 2003). The smaller effect of recasts might be due to the ambiguity it produces for the students in a way that might make them confused between whether the teacher's feedback was an indication of confirmation or a disapproval feedback on their output (Lyster, 2004). Analyses of the errors showed that Kurdish-Arabic L3 learners of English were least accurate on IDS context, because the source of the errors was substitution rather than omission.…”

“…Whereas some studies show that there was no significant difference among different feedback types (e.g., Ammar & Spada, 2006;Loewen & Nabei, 2007;McDonough, 2007), others uncovered different effects of diverse types of feedback on L2 development (e.g., Long, Inagaki, & Ortega, 1998;Leeman, 2003;Ellis, Loewen, & Erlam, 2006). Many studies have examined the advantages of prompts in comparison with that of recasts (e.g., Yang & Lyster, 2010;Havranek, 1999;Ellis, Loewen, & Erlam, 2006;Lyster, 2004;Ammar & Spada, 2006). While the research studies in the classroom usually show prompt as more beneficial, laboratory studies suggest that recasts have a facilitating effect on the development of the second language.…”

“…While the research studies in the classroom usually show prompt as more beneficial, laboratory studies suggest that recasts have a facilitating effect on the development of the second language. Lyster's (2004) study of young learners in the French immersion context, for example, found that when (FFI) is combined with prompts, it was more effective in facilitating the acquisition of grammatical gender than when it was combined with recasts. Similarly, Ammar and Spada (2006) found prompts to be more effective than recasts in the acquisition of English third Person Possessive Determiners (PDs) 'his' and 'her' by young French first language (L1) speakers, but that the effect of feedback depended on the learner's proficiency level.…”

“…Over that time there were two major stages: the first stage consisted of one teaching session held on the first day of the treatment. The teacher gave explanations about the articles and the rules for using definite and indefinite articles, this session was arranged to review the student prior knowledge of the the target structure, since prompts cannot be applied to elicit information that learners do not know already (Lyster, 2004), and to free the results from the effects of the experimental differences.…”