A COMPARISON BETWEEN THE EFFECTIVENESS OF FOCUS ON FORM AND FOCUS ON FORMS INSTRUCTIONS ON CONDITIONAL SENTENCE LEARNING BY IRANIAN PRE-INTERMEDIATE ENGLISH LANGUAGE LEARNERS

This quasi-experimental study attempted to compare the effectiveness of focus on form instruction with focus on forms instruction on conditional sentence learning to Iranian pre-intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners. To this end, six intact classes involving 97 participants who had gained pre-intermediate level scores on the proficiency test and showed relative unfamiliarity with the target structures on the pretest were assigned into three groups. The study employed a pretest, posttest, delayed posttest design and multiple choice type achievement tests were used to measure the effects of treatment. The focus on form group received textual enhancement, contextualized explicit teaching, and dictogloss; the focus on forms group received explicit deductive grammar instruction. Moreover, the control group was taught reading passages containing the conditional structures. The findings indicated a significant difference among the performance of the three groups on both immediate and delayed posttests with focus on form group outperforming the focus on forms and the control groups. The findings also showed a significant difference between the mean scores of the two posttests of each group. Finally, this study suggests that a focus on form instruction can lead to higher accuracy in learning grammatical knowledge in comparison to focus on forms.