The Effects of Focus-on-form Instructions on the Acquisition of English Unaccusative Verbs

The Effects of Focus-on-form Instructions on the Acquisition of English Unaccusative Verbs

There are two types of unaccusative verbs in English: change-type verbs and happen-type verbs. Korean learners of English seem to have serious acquisition problems of these verbs. The purpose of this study is to find the way to increase the acquisition rate of these verbs depending on two kinds of teaching methods: explicit focus-on-form instruction and implicit focus-on-form instruction and to observe which instructional technique is more effective in the Korean EFL learners' acquisition of these verbs. Through 10 weeks of instruction, this study showed that the learners who received the explicit focus-on-form instruction performed better than those who received the implicit instruction regarding the learning of English unaccusative verbs. Therefore, these results can be interpreted as providing evidence for facilitating the effectiveness of input enhancement for the L2 learning of English unaccusative verbs.