The Effects of Implicit and Explicit Focus on Form on Oral Accuracy of EFL Learners

Abstract

The current study was an attempt to reexamine the effectiveness of two kinds of form-focused instruction on oral accuracy of EFL learners. Participants of the current study were 41 male students in two experimental groups and a control group. During twelve sessions of treatment, to the first experimental group (class A), the target forms were taught implicitly through input enhancement (Implicit teaching). In the second class (class B), the grammatical structures were taught in explicit manner through metalinguistic explanation. However, to the control group (class C) no focus on form instruction was applied. A pre-test and a post-test were designed in interview model to test the oral accuracy of the learners both before and after treatment. In order to analyze the obtained scores from pre-test and post-test, paired sample T-Test was used to study the scores within each group, while one-way ANOVA was employed to study the mean variance between groups. The results showed that although both methods were beneficent, post-test scores of the students to whom the forms were taught explicitly were significantly higher than students to whom the forms were taught implicitly.