The effectiveness of form focused instruction in augmenting the use of verb-noun collocations in L2 learners’ writing / Chiah Siew Fei Chiah Suphon

Chiah Siew Fei , Chiah Suphon (2019) The effectiveness of form focused instruction in augmenting the use of verb-noun collocations in L2 learners’ writing / Chiah Siew Fei Chiah Suphon. Masters thesis, University of Malaya.

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Abstract

Form focused instruction (FFI) is a pedagogic approach to teaching linguistic form through communicative language use. This study aims at investigating the effectiveness of FFI in the primary school L2 learners’ use of verb-noun collocations in their writing. In this experimental study, data was collected from pretest and posttest which was conducted before and after a 6 week-course. The 30 respondents from a primary school in KL federal territory (14 males and 16 females) involved in this study were randomly assigned to an experimental group which was treated with Focus on Form (FonF) approach following an inductive and learner-centered learning. The learners in the control group (treated with non FonF approach) followed the traditional Presentation-Practise-Production (PPP) model of language teaching. The analysis of the types of errors found in the use of verb-noun collocations indicated the highest percentage of error occurring in the use of verbs specifically in the formation of the past tense verb form. The errors found revealed that the learners faced difficulties in using delexical or weak verbs such as “make” take” and “have” with the correct noun pairs. The data from the pretest and posttest were also analyzed using a paired sample t-test to determine the between group performance at two time points. The findings suggested that the learners in the FonF group performed better than the non FonF group in terms of the number of collocational uses. This could be attributed to the influence of the focused tasks used during the intervention which gives holistic representation of the collocations in appropriate contexts. Errors in the use, however, are still prevalent in the FonF group as the learners may have stopped short at comprehension without in-depth understanding of the structure.

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