The Differential Effects of ‘Focus on Form’ Tasks on Two Different Grammatical Forms of English

The necessity of ‘focus on form’ in the second language classroom is acknowledged by many researchers and teachers. Nonetheless, researchers have conflicting views on the effectiveness of ‘focus on form’ tasks and techniques. Assuming that the difference between the research findings of ‘focus on form’ study might depend on the choice of linguistic forms to be investigated, this study attempts to compare the acquisition of two grammatical forms under two different instructional treatments. The two grammatical forms investigated are participial adjectives and the passive form of English and the two focus on form tasks used are input processing instruction and dictogloss task. Though the results of this study did not lead to make a definite conclusion, there seems to be a tendency that the dictogloss task, which is relatively less obtrusive than input processing instruction in getting learners’ attention to form, is more effective in learning participial adjectives which is comparatively simple and transparent and that input processing instruction is more effective in learning the passive form which is relatively complex. This study attempts to show that the relative complexity of grammatical structure might affect the degree to which ‘focus on form’ tasks are useful.