Focus-on-Form Instructional Methods Promote Deaf College Students' Improvement in English Grammar

Abstract

Focus-on-form English teaching methods are designed to facilitate second-language learners' noticing of target language input, where "noticing" is an acquisitional prerequisite for the comprehension, processing, and eventual integration of new grammatical knowledge. While primarily designed for teaching hearing second-language learners, many focus-on-form methods lend themselves to visual presentation. This article reports the results of classroom research on the visually based implementation of focus-on-form methods with deaf college students learning English. Two of 3 groups of deaf students received focus-on-form instruction during a 10-week remedial grammar course; a third control group received grammatical instruction that did not involve focus-on-form methods. The 2 experimental groups exhibited significantly greater improvement in English grammatical knowledge relative to the control group. These results validate the efficacy of visually based focus-on-form English instruction for deaf students of English and set the stage for the continual search for innovative and effective English teaching methodologies.

Language and Literacy: Issues and Considerations

“…Berent et al [133] implemented a visually based focus-on-form approach to writing instruction in which learners were made aware of the grammatical form of language features that they were already able to use communicatively. Experimental groups in this study demonstrated significantly greater improvement in English grammatical knowledge relative to the control group after a 10-week remedial grammar course.…”

An animated dictionary for hearing‐impaired students in Thailand

“…The development of spoken English language and literacy skills is a challenging task for hearing‐impaired learners because of hearing loss restricting the intake of linguistic information through the auditory channel (Berent, Kelly and Aldersley et al., 2007; Bochner and Albertini, 1988). The acquisition of morphology, syntax and vocabulary such as inflectional affixes, function words and deviations from canonical word order are particular areas of difficulty (Bochner and Bochner, 2009).…”

“…Since deaf learners rely heavily on visual and printed input in their language acquisition, Bochner and Bochner (2009) advocate the use of communication methods that foster meaningful face‐to‐face social interactions, such as speech reading, finger spelling and cued speech, to facilitate the visual processing of linguistic information. The results of the study of Berent et al. (2007) showed that visual input enhancement proved to be an effective pedagogical tool for hearing‐impaired college students.…”

Textual Enhancement of Input: Issues and Possibilities

“…Moreover, they will likely be able to determine, and even set up a benchmark for, 'the extent to which learner attention should be directed' (Doughty 2004: 187). Current research has provided evidence showing that compound enhancement is not always necessary (see Williams and Evans 1998;Berent et al 2007).…”