Effects of Focus-on-Form(s) Instruction on Iranian Intermediate L2 Learners’ Metaphorical Competence Development

Recent developments in cognitive linguistics have highlighted the importance and the ubiquity of metaphors in language. Their effect has been instrumental in making significant headway into the pedagogical practice and design of teaching materials. The current study was carried out to explore the efficacy of focus-on-form (FonF) and focus-on-forms (FonFs) instructions on learning metaphorical language by Iranian intermediate learners of English. First, 60 participants who were homogeneous in terms of language proficiency and metaphorical competence were assigned to 3 groups, 2 being the experimental groups and 1 the control group. One of the experimental groups was exposed to the explicit teaching of metaphors (i.e. FonFs) included in 20 reading passages. The second group was taught the target metaphorical expressions through implicit instruction (i.e. FonF). And, the control group went through the usual classroom instruction; they took the same pretest and posttest as the 2 experimental groups did. To analyze the data, a three-way ANOVA and analysis of covariance were utilized. The findings revealed that the FonFs-taught group gained better results on the posttest. The results seem to indicate a positive correlation between the FonFs and metaphorical competence. It could be claimed that it is possible to enhance L2 learners’ metaphorical competence through the FonFs instruction of metaphors.