The Effect of Form-Focused Instruction (FFI) on Teaching English Grammar to Iranian Learners at the Intermediate Level

The present study investigated the effects of form-focused instruction (FFI) on teaching English grammar to Iranian learners at the intermediate level. The design of the study was a pre and post-test which dealt with 40 participants at the intermediate level and comprised of two experimental groups. The pre-test on grammatical patterns was administered to assess the participants’ knowledge on the patterns in the passages at the beginning of the course. Then they were taught through implicit and explicit Form-focused instruction (FFI) developed by R. Ellis (2004) and Spada and Lightbown (2008). Each group included 20 participants. The implicit FFI group received grammatical pattern instruction through indirect instruction which focus on the use of grammatical patterns in the contexts and reading passages discussion. The explicit FFI group received instructions on how to use the structural patterns and immediate feedback coming from the peers and the teachers in the classroom. The treatment took 10 sessions and ended in a post-test stage to evaluate the course effectiveness. Data were analyzed through Independent Samples t-test and results showed that there was a significant difference between the two groups. In other words, the explicit FFI group outperformed the implicit FFI one. Implications of the study for teachers who practice English grammar could be the use of explicit instruction on forms and then put them into practice contextually.