The Effects of Explicit Focus on Form on L2 Learning

Recently much research has investigated the role of attention in L2 learning, comparing the effects of explicit learning with those of implicit learning. With this background the research aims at examining the effects explicit focus on form has on L2 learning based on the acquisition of the English article system. The participants were 70 Korean college students who enrolled in English Composition classes. The experimental group received explicit focus on form including grammatical explanation, input enhancement, output practice, and negative evidence (corrective feedback) for two weeks, while the control group was exposed to sufficient input and negative evidence. Completion tasks were administered at the beginning and the end of the semester. In addition, errors in the use of English articles were analysed on their compositions both before and after the different treatments. The analyses of the results show that the explicit focus on form group improved significantly more than the control group, particularly for the definite article 'the', and some changes occurred in the distribution of article errors. These findings suggest that explicit teaching plays a more contributory role than implicit teaching in acquiring L2 knowledge in classroom-based L2 learning.