Focus on form tasks and the provision of corrective feedback

Abstract

This paper examines how different tasks may provide learners with opportunities to produce output collaboratively (Swain 8 Lapkin, 1997) and receive teacher's feedback. To meet this end, 48 English for Specific Purposes (ESP) students performed the following focus-on-form tasks: dictogloss, text reconstruction, multiple choice and cloze test. As the number of language-related episodes shows, dictogloss is the task that generated fewer episodes centred on language. In turn, the tasks that most facilitate teacher's feedback are text reconstruction and cloze test. The findings of this study may be relevant in the English-as-a-foreign language context, where the number of students per class is large and the possibility to obtain individual feedback is scarce.

Keywords

• focus on form
• dictogloss
• feedback