Planned Focus-on-form Instruction in Task-based Language Teaching: The case of EFL learners’ oral grammatical accuracy performance

This study investigated the effects of planned focus-on-form instruction (pFFI) on developing oral grammatical accuracy in Iranian English EFL learners. To this end, 60 lower-intermediate EFL learners studying English in a private English language institute in Tehran, Iran, were randomly assigned to two classes. Both classes received a task-based instruction on grammatical points elicited in oral production of English sentences with the only difference that one class, the experimental group (N=30) had a pFFI instruction (i.e., the target grammatical structures selected in advance), and the other class, the control group (N = 30), had a task-based instruction without any focus on planned grammatical structures. Learners’ oral performance was observed in their answers to pictorial cues in the pretest and posttest. The results of the study revealed that although both groups significantly improved in their oral performance in terms of grammatical accuracy, pFFI instruction was more effective on the experimental group since they significantly outperformed the control group.