The Effect of Focus-on-Form on the Acquisition of English Grammatical Morphemes by a Korean EFL Learner

The Effect of Focus-on-Form on the Acquisition of English Grammatical Morphemes by a Korean EFL Learner

  Although the effect of grammar instruction in second and foreign language learning has been strongly questioned since the advent of the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) approach, recent research reveals that L2 learners develop limited grammatical competence without appropriate focus-on-form. In particular, as English learning starts at an earlier age, the role and effect of grammar instruction is again brought into discussion to prevent or minimize early fossilization by young learners. This paper aims to investigate the effect of focus-on-form on the acquisition of English grammatical morphemes by a young Korean EFL learner. For this purpose, firstly, the incremental development of the VP and NP structure was investigated using two years" writing data of a six-grade Korean boy. Then error types salient in the learner language were identified and the effect of focus-on-form was examined after corrective feedback was given six times over the period of six weeks. Focus-on-form through corrective feedback was mainly given to the use of the English article system (zero/a/the/plural -(e)s) and subject-verb agreement (third person singular -(e)s).