Incidental Focus on Form in University Spanish Literature Courses

Abstract

Incidental focus on form is one of several ways to direct language learners' attention to formal aspects of language within meaningful communicative contexts. Learners can benefit from focus on form, but the extent to which incidental focus on form, or any other type, is available to learners in advanced foreign language literature classes has not been widely researched. In a multiple case study approach, three university Spanish literature classes were studied over the course of a 15-week semester. Data were collected through class observations, instructor interviews, and instructor stimulated recalls. Using a modified version of Ellis's (2001) taxonomy of form-focused instruction, we found that recasts were the instructors' preferred form of feedback, with negotiation and explicit correction being extremely rare. Furthermore, preemptive focus on form was common, but almost exclusively limited to vocabulary. We discuss these findings with regard to two different points of view, the literature instructors' and the research on form-focused instruction. We then provide suggestions for increasing learners' opportunities for attention to form in literature courses while acknowledging the reality of the context. THE FIELD OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUIS-ITION (SLA) has placed much emphasis on the constructs of attention (e.g.

Oral corrective feedback: teachers’ concerns and researchers’ orientation

“…In a multiple case study of three university Spanish literature classes, Zyzik and Polio (2008) found that teachers preferred to use recasts for correcting errors because it did not embarrass the learners. The authors speculated that the short utterances produced by the learners might have been the reason the teachers used this type of feedback predominantly and that other types of feedback involving negotiation might have been considered more time-consuming.…”

“…Several studies (Mackey et al 2004;Mori 2011;Polio et al 2006;Zyzik and Polio 2008) have examined how individual teachers' views about their lessons, their learners, learning and teaching atmosphere may affect their use of incidental focus on form techniques. However, these studies have a number of limitations that we will try to address in the present study.…”

Understanding the “mmhm”: Dilemmas in talk between teachers and adolescent emergent bilingual students

“…These pedagogical moves -accepting Ana's assurance and anticipating future difficulties as matters of spelling rather than meaning -preclude Ana from having to demonstrate her comprehension. Some of this lack of "negotiation of meaning" may be due to a preference for indirect correction (Zyzik & Polio, 2008), a concern for helping Ana "save face" (Musumeci, 1996) by not forcing her to prove her knowledge, or the teacher's assumption that Ana would in fact signal her lack of comprehension if she did not understand the language being used.…”

Patterns of tasks, patterns of talk: L2 literacy building in university Spanish classes

“…Scholars have argued that the language-content or languageliterature 'gap' that exists between courses in the basic-intermediate and upper-level course sequences often makes third-year language learning problematic (Brandes & Rettig, 1986;Brown, Bown, & Egget, 2009;Kraemer, 2008;Lord, 2014;Paesani, 2011). Students who are used to learning the grammatical and lexical patterns in beginning and intermediate courses need help learning to function in upper-level courses, which tend to focus primarily on content, typically literature (Zyzik & Polio, 2008). Examining third-year foreign language (FL) courses thus presents an opportunity to discover the ways that languagelearning tasks can be effectively integrated across these sequences.…”