Providing EAL students with grammatical focus in a mainstream secondary school Irena Gwiazda, PhD Teach Meet Research Oxford 2016

Form-focused instruction research

Research design A quasi-experimental study Explanatory sequential mixed methods design – quantitative data followed by qualitative 91 EAL students aged groups – Isolated FFI (n=27), Integrated FFI (n=28), and control (n=36) 10 x Isolated or Integrated FFI lessons with use of short films as the communicative background

Experimental groups versus the control group The effect of intervention was statistically significant (F 1.89 = , p<0.001).

Long term language production gains

The notion of noticing in Second Language Acquisition The role of noticing: Noticing of forms in the communicative context as prerequisite to learning them (Schmidt 1990, 1995) Learning as a consequence of a learner having noticed a target form for enough number of times (threshold effect), or rather the noticing of a target form occurs because it has already developed in the learner’s explicit knowledge (Fotos, 2004) e.g. by means of instruction (the form is not learnt unless it is noticed or it is not noticed unless it is learnt) When the latter phenomenon takes place, it facilitates the process of transferring that knowledge of the form into the long term memory (Ellis, 2005).

Noticing – research findings In the majority of the interviews with both ISO and INT participants, regardless of how they scored in the tests, the noticing of forms, also in the mainstream lessons, was a skill that they attributed to the intervention triggering that process. Noticing of forms while reading in the mainstream was commonly reported by the respondents.

Noticing: possible processes Awareness raising input Time taken to digest the FFI Noticing of the target structures in their ‘natural environment’ = mainstream classroom input Making necessary connections between the awareness raising stimulus received in the intervention, and the language of the mainstream classroom input Random encounters: Johnny’s ‘Eureka’ moment

Addressing the issues Interventions Collaborative teaching

Aims: To ensure that the EAL students’ learning needs are better met in the mainstream, and their language learning is facilitated by all the teachers in a more targeted way To encourage the EAL students, particularly those with good functional levels of English, to improve their grammatical and lexical accuracy To raise the mainstream subject teachers’ awareness of the EAL students’ needs and to promote the EAL focus in the mainstream subjects so that the students’ linguistic needs are supported inside and outside of the EAL interventions and English lessons.

EAL target stickers

Language target sticker cycle

Advantages: Students have a clear linguistic focus when they write in any subject, not just English. With time, they become more confident to correct their mistakes in a proofreading phase, since corrective feedback acts as language instruction. The increased awareness of a selected linguistic element promotes noticing of this targeted form in the input, facilitating further learning.

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