Teaching Idiomatic Expressions through Focus-on-Form Techniques: Assessing Language Complexity

The bulk of materials on focus-on-form instruction is limited in scope as the researchers were much involved with structural patterns and vocabulary. Whether this approach leads to the same overwhelming results in more holistic linguistic items like idiomatic expressions is still open to research. This research aims at analyzing the performance of 60 non-native participants in focus-on-form tasks in which participants were supposed to write a scenario for the idioms they had been instructed. Participants were divided into Group A (performing the task individually) and Group B (performing the task in pair work). Their performance which was a written scenario was analyzed to investigate which task implementation style (group work or individual work) was the most potential style in leading participants to more use of idiomatic expressions. Frequency-based analysis of idiomatic expressions in learner language seems to mask a very important language-related feature which is the complexity of language produced by the learners. Complexity of language was analyzed through measuring the length and complexity of sentences. The results show that group work and individual work created a different medium for focusing on idiomatic expressions. The results show that teachers and materials developers should make principled decisions about the type of the tasks they use and the way the tasks are implemented in classes.