Interactions between type of form-focused instruction, type of morphosyntactic form, and type of language knowledge

Although claims about the nature of EFL/ESL learners' knowledge (i. e., implicit and/or explicit) are essential to many debates in foreign/second language development, few studies have sought to evaluate the effects of linguistic and/or contextual variables on the two knowledge types. This study, accordingly, undertook to examine the effects of different explicit and implicit types of form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of four easy and difficult forms as assessed by different implicit and explicit outcome measures. The instruments utilized to assess students' learning were: oral elicited imitation, untimed and timed grammaticality judgment, and metalinguistic knowledge tests. A pretest and two posttests were administered to 150 novice learners immediately after FFI and again after a 4-week delay. Immediate and durable effects of FFI were found for the easy and difficult target forms on both implicit and explicit knowledge measures. Specifically, the study indicated that explicit and implicit types of FFI were significantly more beneficial for explicitly-easy and implicitly-easy language forms respectively. The findings of this study may contribute a different set of insights to our understanding of the efficacy of varying types of FFI on learners' controlled and/or spontaneous use of easy and difficult structures at early stages of L2 development.