An Investigation of Integrated and Closely Sequenced Form-Focused Instruction

In this study the timing issue in form-focused instruction (FFI) was investigated from a practical pedagogical perspective by comparing one instructional procedure that integrated FFI into a communicative task and one that provided FFI following a task in a closely sequenced fashion. Learners’ production accuracy on two target forms—situational-the and experiential present perfect—was measured using two pretests and two posttests that imposed pressured and unpressured performance conditions. On situational-the, the only significant mean accuracy gain was recorded by the integrated procedure learners under unpressured test conditions, a gain that was significantly different to that made by the sequenced FFI group. On experiential present perfect, only the gains in production accuracy made by the integrated FFI treatment group were significantly larger than those made by a comparison group. The results challenge Spada and Lightbown’s (2008) assumptions about which type of FFI might be more effective for which type of grammatical language feature by showing that the procedure incorporating integrated FFI was more effective irrespective of language feature type and that the type of knowledge affected depends on target form.