The Role of Planned Preemptive and Reactive Focus-on-Form in Developing L2 Learners’ Grammatical Accuracy

Drawing on the principles of noticing hypothesis, focus on form (FonF) instruction emerged as a mediator between meaning-focused and form-focused approaches to teaching L2 grammar. The present study examines the differential effects of two forms of FonF, planned preemptive and reactive FonF, on Iranian beginner EFL learners’ grammatical accuracy in written output. Following a quasiexperimental design, 40 beginner learners, including both male and female, were recruited out of 100 based on the results of a proficiency test and then assigned to two experimental groups. One group received planned preemptive feedback on related grammatical items to enable the learners to avoid any errors, while the other group received reactive FonF which was implemented by offering explicit corrective feedback on learners’ errors after the occurrence. The results of t data analysis revealed that while both groups underwent a significant change in terms of L2 grammatical accuracy, the planned preemptive group outperformed the reactive group which indicated that (a) presenting language before the task performance could result in enhanced noticing and improved performance and (b) drawing students’ attention to the linguistic elements during meaningful activities presents an additional difficulty of distributing attention over both form and meaning.