ABSTRACT
Research on the effects of instruction has revealed, overall, a positive effect for focusing learners’ attention on form (Norris & Ortega, 2000). Of course, it is not clear that all instruction is equally beneficial or that all instruction works on the various processes involved in acquisition the same way (Doughty & Williams, 1998; VanPatten, 2002; also, see Collentine, this volume, for a discussion of effect sizes). It could be that some instructional efforts only develop explicit knowledge by which learners can perform some tasks (Doughty, 2003) or still that other efforts develop particular skills that don’t transfer to other skills (e.g., DeKeyser & Sokalski, 1996). Nonetheless, there seems to be evidence that some types of formal focus, because they are derived from previous research about what we actually know about learner processing, actually do have some kind of significant effect.
