Incidental Focus on Form in English Language Teaching

With the advent of communicative language teaching,
meaning-oriented and task-based language teaching
gained a lot of ground at the expense of
deemphasizing the explicit and focused attention to
grammar and other formal aspects of language.
However, in recent years, there have been numerous
calls for integrating communicative language
teaching with focus on form instruction. This book
explores various aspects of focus on form in general
and incidental focus on form in particular. It
investigates how teachers in a real EFL context draw
attention to form temporarily and incidentally
within meaning oriented classes without disrupting
the natural flow of communication. Moreover, it
provides a critical analysis and modified definition
of uptake commonly used to assess the effectiveness
of focus on form instruction.

Graduate students and researchers in ELT, applied
linguistics, classroom conversation analysis and
respective fields in linguistics as well as ESL/EFL
teachers will find this book highly useful
in seeing how a compromise can be made between
analytic and synthetic approaches to Second Language
Acquisition.