The effects and effectiveness of contrastive form-focused instruction on mastering tense-aspect

Abstract

This study focuses on the impact of the type of form-focused instruction (FFI) on its eficiency in mastering L2 forms. The hypothesis that FFI, which induces structural and metalinguistic salience on the basis of contrastive analysis of the learner's L1 and L2, would be particularly effective at facilitating the acquisition of dif cult L2 forms was tested in a quasi-experimental study comparing the effectiveness of two types of FFI, one with and one without a contrastive component. The contrastive FFI explicitly drew learners' attention to the cross-linguistic differences in the tense-aspect systems of their L2 and L1 while the non-contrastive treatment only focused on the tense-aspect system of the L2. The effects of these two types of FFI were assessed by analysing the learners' pre-test and post-test performance on two tasks differing in the extent to which they involve the activation of explicit and implicit linguistic knowledge: a grammatical judgment task and a controlled translation task. Results from the analyses indicate differential effects for different tasks