Student-Initiated Attention To Form In EFL Classroom Discussion

Recently there has been a call for an integration of meaning-focused and form-focused instruction in the second language (L2) classroom, in order to promote both student's fluency and accuracy in the target language (Spada, 1997; Doughty & Williams, 1998; Williams, 1999, etc.). And studies on this aspect have suggested that the incorporation of some attention to form into meaning-centered instruction can lead to improved performance, as accuracy is concerned, in comprehension and production (Ellis, 1993; Spada & Lightbown, 1993; Dekeyser, 1995; Lyster & Ranta, 1997; Doughty & Varela, 1998; Mackey & Philp, 1998; Williams & Evans, 1998, etc.). However, most of these studies are conducted in second language classrooms abroad, and little research has been done relating to Chinese EFL context.Theoretically based on the Interaction Hypothesis and the Noticing Hypothesis, the present descriptive study examines the following questions: 1) Do students spontaneously attend to form in meaning-centered EFL classroom pair or small-group discussion? If they do, then, 2) Is proficiency level related to the extent to which they do so? 3) How do students draw attention to form? 4) What kinds of forms do they attend to? This study involved classroom observation and MP3 players were used to record the production of 32 students from 4 classes at 2 proficiency levels (2 intermediate classes and 2 advanced classes) during meaning-centered classroom discussion. A total of 32 hours of meaning-focused classroom pair and small-group discussion were recorded and then transcribed with language-related episodes (LRE) identified for subsequent analysis. Results suggest: 1) Students do initiate attention to form in meaning-centered EFL classroom pair and small-group discussions. 2) The numbers of LREs produced by students are related to their English proficiency. 3) Students initiate LREs by requests to the teacher or other students, self-correction, other correction, student-student negotiation and metatalk. Among these various ways, self-correction is the most prevalent. 4) Students pay more attention to lexical items than morphosyntactic issues.The present study is empirically based on Williams's (1999) research. It is intended to compare students'attention in an ESL and EFL context. Results show that in both contexts, students can spontaneously attend to form through various ways, and they mainly focus on lexical items. However, results coming out from the two studies in different contexts also show differences. For one thing, Williams (1999) found that students paid more attention to form as proficiency rose, while in the present study, there was a slight decrease in students'attention to form as proficiency rose. For another, students in the present study were found to use self-correction most frequently while in Williams's study it was completely invisible and students most frequently attended to form by requests to the teacher. The difference found in the results may primarily due to the difference between the research contexts, that is, the difference between an ESL and an EFL context.