Comparing Language Teaching Methodologies: Form vs. Meaning
Prescriptive Grammar and Language Standards
Prescriptive grammar tries to preserve what is assumed to be the standard language by telling people what rules they should know and how they should speak and write. Therefore, according to prescriptivism, grammar teaching is often seen as establishing the “correct” way of speaking and writing.
Focus on Forms: The Traditional Approach
This option is today considered the traditional approach, although it has not always been viewed that way. Course design starts with the language to be taught. The teacher or textbook writer divides the L2 into segments of various kinds (phonemes, words, collocations, intonation patterns, and so on), and presents these to the learner in models, initially one item at a time, in a sequence determined by (rather vague, usually intuitive) notions of frequency, valence, or (the all-purpose and question-begging) “difficulty“.
- Learners are typically encouraged to master each linguistic item in synthetic syllabuses one at a time, to native speaker levels using synthetic materials, methodology, and pedagogy.
- Synthetic syllabi are accompanied by synthetic “methods” and by the synthetic classroom devices and practices commonly associated with them.
- Together, they result in lessons with what is called focus on forms. Focus on forms lessons tend to be rather dry, consisting principally of work on the linguistic items, which students are expected to master one at a time, often to native speaker levels, with anything less treated as “error,” and little if any communicative L2 use.
Six Major Problems with Focus on Forms
- It is a one-size-fits-all approach. This is discouraging to students and inefficient.
- Focus on forms often leads to what Widdowson (1972) called language usage, not to realistic models of language use.
- Focus on forms ignores language learning processes.
- Leaving learners out of syllabus design ignores the major role they will play in language development. The idea that what you teach is what they learn, and when you teach it is when they learn it, is not just simplistic; it is wrong.
- Despite the best efforts even of highly skilled teachers and textbook writers, focus on forms tends to produce boring lessons, with resulting declines in motivation, attention, and student enrollments.
- The assertion that many students all over the world have learned languages via a focus on forms ignores the possibility that they have really learned despite it. A focus on forms produces many more false beginners than finishers.
Focus on Meaning: The Communicative Shift
A typical response to frustration with the previous option has been a radical pendulum swing: focusing on meaning. Unlike focusing on forms, the starting point in focus on meaning is not the language, but the learner and learning processes. Accordingly, focus on meaning lessons are purely communicative. Learners are presented with comprehensible samples of communicative L2 use. It is the learner, not the teacher or textbook writer, who must analyze the L2, at a subconscious level, inducing grammar rules simply from exposure to the input, i.e., from positive evidence alone. Grammar is considered to be best learned incidentally and implicitly.
Limitations of Focus on Meaning
Although arguably a great improvement on focus on forms, a focus on meaning suffers from at least three problems:
- A number of studies suggest that older children, adolescents, and adults regularly fail to achieve native-like levels in an L2 not because of lack of opportunity, motivation, or ability, but because they have lost access to whatever innate abilities they used to learn language(s) in early childhood. If so, it will be insufficient for later L2 learning simply to recreate the conditions for L1 in the classroom.
- Although considerable progress in an L2 is clearly achieved in focus on meaning classrooms, it has also been found that even after as much as L2 years of classroom immersion, proficiency may plateau.
- A pure focus on meaning is inefficient. Studies show rate advantages for learners who receive instruction with attention to code features. As it has been argued for many years, comprehensible L2 input is necessary, but not sufficient.
Focus on Form: Integrating Attention and Context
Both the extreme interventionist focus on forms and the non-interventionist focus on meaning have problems, which often lead to further pendulum swing. There is a viable third option, however, which attempts to capture the strengths of an analytic approach while dealing with its limitations, and which is called Focus on Form.
Focus on Form refers to how attentional resources are allocated and involves briefly drawing students’ attention to linguistic elements in context. The purpose is to induce what Schmidt (1993, and elsewhere) calls noticing, i.e., registering forms in the input so as to store them in memory. Focus on form, therefore, is learner-centered: it respects the learner’s internal syllabus. It is under learner control: it occurs just when he or she has a communication problem, and so is likely already at least partially to understand the meaning or function of the new form, and when he or she is attending to the input.
Task-Based Needs Analysis
Conduct a task-based needs analysis to identify the learners’ current or future target tasks. These are the real-world things people do in everyday life:
- Buying a bus pass
- Asking for street directions
- Attending a lecture
- Reading a menu
- Writing a laboratory report, and so on.