Reflection # 8 Form-focused Vs. Communicative

What is it going to be form-focused or communicative or a combination of both. Back up your thoughts with some of the studies in LS Ch. 6.

I firmly believe in combining form-focused and communicative. In the test conducted by Sauvignon, not surprisingly, the group that had an extra hour a week of “communication” performed better on the four communicative tests. However, this study didn’t prove the inefficacy of form-focused; it just proved the efficacy of meaning-based instruction and the importance of practicing in real life the skills acquired. So, in conclusion, it proved the validity of the combination of the two approaches. In the studies conducted in the Canadian ESL classrooms by Spada, Lightbown and White, where there was an absence of form instruction, the students continued to have problems with linguistic accuracy even though they had good communicative competence, while in other of their studies, students that received explicit instruction on the differences in possessive determiners in English and French displayed better use of these features than the group that didn’t receive this kind of instruction.

I think most the studies in LS Ch. 6 show that the combination of form and communicative approaches leads to both communicative competence and accuracy, but my impression is that most (if not all) these studies involved motivated students. A different case (as the authors point out on page 140) is the case of public schools with students with all levels of motivation (or lack thereof) and where most students only take a foreign language for two years and don’t further the language study or use. Considering that after studying a language in high school for two years, students are going to forget it and will be unable to use it to communicate, may be (just maybe) the old form-focused translation-and-memorization-based approach at least permitted students to get to know how a certain foreign language “works”, for example, the Latin declensions, the nominative, the genitive, etc, and they could use that knowledge to speak their own language better. The way FL (I’m NOT speaking of ESL) is taught today in our high schools leave most students without communicative competence and without any (or very little) knowledge of the FL form. However, I don’t advocate going back to teaching foreign languages in an all form-focused way; I personally would die of boredom teaching it, or I’d be killed by some of my bored students!