Exploring the Congruence between Teachers’ and Students’ Preferences for Form-focused Instruction: Isolated or Integrated?

| August 14, 2012
Title
Exploring the Congruence between Teachers’ and Students’ Preferences for Form-focused Instruction: Isolated or Integrated?

Keywords:  Form-focused instruction, Isolated form-focused instruction, Integrating
form-focused instruction, Learners’ preferences, Teachers’ preferences

Authors
Mehdi Haseli Songhori
Department of English
Zahedan Branch, Islamic Azad University
Zahedan, Iran

Bio Data
Mehdi Haseli Songhori holds an MA degree in TEFL. He is an academic staff of the English department at Azad University of Zahedan, Iran. He has been teaching English for ten years in different universities and language institutes. His research interests include reading comprehension strategies, grammar teaching, and vocabulary learning.

Abstract
Learners’ and teachers’ preferences regarding language learning and teaching and the mismatch between their preferences, which can be a source of problems for both learners and teachers, have been of paramount importance for a couple of decades. Grammar instruction is an area of language teaching in which learners’ and teachers’ preferences warrant investigation. Therefore, this study explored the congruence between English students’ and teachers’ preferences for isolated and integrated form focused instruction (FFI). A total of 202 English students and 30 English teachers completed a 26-item and a 22-item questionnaire respectively. The items were analyzed by SPSS 16.0 software. The means and standard deviation of students and teachers questionnaires were calculated separately and the Pearson Correlation method of analysis was employed to compare both groups. Results indicate that students and teachers preferred integrated FFI over isolated FFI. The comparison of the two groups revealed that there is a strong correlation between students and teachers concerning their preference for integrated FFI. However, there seems to be a mismatch between the reality of the grammar classes and the preferences of the students and teachers, which will be explained in the discussion of the study.

[private] See page: 4-23

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Category: Monthly Editions, Volume 62