An article from Eric on Michael Long and SLA. Thank you as usual Eric!
Helena Curtain is trying to stay relevant and read current research. She sent Alisa and I both this 2011 article by SLA researcher Michael Long.
Long is all about Task-Based Language Teaching (TBLT) and I think credited with the “interaction hypothesis” (which doesn’t say why interaction is beneficial). Anyway, TBLT has a lot in common with TCI – more in common than traditional approaches with grammatical syllabi – both meaning-based. I think TBLT, when put into practice, does have students doing a lot more group work and forced output than TCI. One of the key principles is “learn by doing.” It is one type of the so-called “communicative approach.”
Something that Long advocates is called “focus on form” (e.g. text enhancement, recasts, structured input like that of VP, structured output). It means that students’ attention gets drawn to form, but as it affects communication and often as a response to student needs (e.g. reactive). Contrast that with focus on formS, which is when you present a pre-selected rule and design activities to practice it (traditional instruction or what Long calls a “synthetic approach”). Anyways, TPRS teachers probably all do some focus on form to varying degrees. TCI includes recasts (when we restate correctly what a student intended to say), does sometimes enhance texts (using different colors for targets), does do some contrastive grammar circling which is similar to structured input (e.g. is it “es” or “está”?) and a grammar pop-up is a unique type of focus on form.
Focus on form is believed to be a more efficient way to supplement CI, since the focus is still on meaning and more appropriate to a students’ developmental needs. In other words, focus on form can give a student i+1 while still focusing on meaning – Krashen, too, would accept that. Even if it works, it would still make little contribution to total acquisition in a classroom setting, considering that all of our students are on a different level i and we don’t know for sure every student’s level and the scarcity of these focus on form moments in a classroom of 20+ students with 1 teacher. And to be clear, not all types of focus on form tailor the input to all the students’ developmental level, e.g. VP’s structured input approach. VP wants to use an input-based means of focusing on form, whereas Krashen would just say give them more input with the focus purely on meaning.