Planned Focus-on-Form in the EFL Context through Authentic Texts Rich in Comparative and Superlative Adjectives

In the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) context, students are mostly oriented to focus-on-forms instruction, and communicative interaction is limited particularly in lower levels. Thus, EFL teachers should try to adjust focus-on-form instruction to such settings. With that in mind, this study examined the planned focus-on-form through the use of authentic texts rich in comparative and superlative adjectives in the EFL context. Three intact elementary classes were assigned to planned focus-on-form, incidental focus-on-form, and control groups. A timed grammaticality judgment test which contained the target forms was devised as pre-test, and immediate and delayed post-tests, but with different order of items. After the pretest, the planned focus-on-form group was instructed through dictogloss activities on authentic texts rich in target forms, the incidental focus-on-form group through opinion-gap tasks involving target forms, and the control group through focus-on-forms. The 1-way analyses of variance of both immediate and delayed posttests showed that the planned focus-on-form group significantly outperformed the two other groups, with incidental focus-on-form group performing significantly better than focus-on-forms one only in the posttest. The findings confirm the idea that authentic texts rich in target forms can be an effective means of implementing a kind of planned focus-on-form instruction suiting the EFL setting.