Effect of ‘Focus on Form’ versus ‘Focus on Forms’ Pragmatic Instruction on Development of Pragmatic Comprehension and Production

Abstract

To develop target language pragmatic competence, language learners’ attention must be directed toward not only linguistic but also pragmatic aspect of the target language expressions (Schmidt, 2001). Thus, some sorts of pragmatic awareness-raising instruction, using either explicit ‘Focus on Forms’ or implicit ‘Focus on Form’ techniques, are advised by scholars to develop pragmatic competence in language learners (e.g. Eslami-Rasekh, 2005; Bardovi-Harlig & Mahan-Taylor, 2003). To this end, the current experimental study was conducted on 52 undergraduate students of English at a university in Iran to investigate the effect of ‘Focus on Form’ versus ‘Focus on Forms’ pragmatic instruction on the development of their pragmatic comprehension and production. The experiment consisted of three phases: 1) the random assignment of participants to two groups: a ‘Focus on Forms’ group receiving metapragmatic explanations of target language pragmatic forms and a ‘Focus on Form’ group receiving target language pragmatic instruction using input enhancement, input flood, and recast, 2) conducting intervention for one semester, and 3) assessing their pragmatic comprehension and production knowledge following the intervention. Assessment tools consisted of a 4-senario discourse completion task and a 16-item multiple-choice pragmatic comprehension test both developed by Taguchi (2012). The results of multivariate analysis of variance (MANOVA) revealed that both ‘Focus on Form’ and ‘Focus on Forms’ methods of pragmatic instruction had a significant effect on the development of pragmatic comprehension and production. However, language learners in ‘Focus on Forms’ group had a significantly better development than language learners in the ‘Focus on Form’ group. This significant development was evident for both the comprehension and production aspects of pragmatic competence. The pedagogical implications of the findings suggested furnishing English as foreign language classes with ‘Focus on Forms’ pragmatic instruction.

Keywords: Focus on Form Instruction, Focus on Forms Instruction, Pragmatic Comprehension, Pragmatic Production