Incidental Focus on Form in English Language Teaching: Reactive and Preemptive Focus on Form Practices, and Uptake in EFL Classes

With the advent of communicative language teaching, meaning-oriented and task-based language teaching gained a lot of ground at the expense of deemphasizing the explicit and focused attention to grammar and other formal aspects of language. However, in recent years, there have been numerous calls for integrating communicative language teaching with focus on form instruction. This book explores various aspects of focus on form in general and incidental focus on form in particular. It investigates how teachers in a real EFL context draw attention to form temporarily and incidentally within meaning oriented classes without disrupting the natural flow of communication. Moreover, it provides a critical analysis and modified definition of uptake commonly used to assess the effectiveness of focus on form instruction. Graduate students and researchers in ELT, applied linguistics, classroom conversation analysis and respective fields in linguistics as well as ESL/EFL teachers will find this book highly useful in seeing how a compromise can be made between analytic and synthetic approaches to Second Language Acquisition.

Javad Gholami is an Assistant Professor in TEFL from Urmia University, Iran. He has been working as an EFL practitioner and researcher for more than 10 years. His research publications have been on integrating focus on form instruction and communicative language teaching, intralingual translation, and learner autonomy in ELT.