collaborative planned form-focused activities vs collaborative incidental form-focused activities: elementary efl learners' grammar learning in focus

abstract this study was an attempt to investigate the effect of collaborative form-focused activities on grammar learning of elementary efl learners. to this end, 58 adult male iranian efl learners at elementary level of proficiency in three classes of language institutes were chosen. they formed the three groups of the study. the grammar section of cambridge michigan placement test was used to ensure the homogeneity of the groups. then, a grammar pre-test was administered to all groups to ensure that the participants were unfamiliar with the target grammatical items (irregular past tense of the verbs). at this stage, the treatment started and while one experimental group received collaborative planned form-focused activities, the other experimental group received collaborative incidental form-focused activities. the control group underwent regular classroom patterns and methods. after the treatment sessions, all the groups took a grammar post-test and their knowledge of the target irregular past tense was checked. finally, spss software was used to run t-test. the results revealed that there was a significant difference between the three groups regarding grammar learning, and that the group who experienced collaborative planned form-focused activities outperformed the other two groups.