Form-focused remedial instruction:An empirical study

This article reports on an empirical study exploring the effectiveness of giving oral remedial instruction to secondary and university students using a consciousness-raising approach. The focus of remedial instruction was three high-frequency lexico-grammatical anomalies: ‘pseudo-tough movement’, the verb concern and the related adjective concerned, and the connective on the contrary. The instrument consisted of two identical tests before treatment (pre-test) and after treatment (post-test), as well as a delayed post-test with different test items. The tests were also administered to some control groups, but while the experimental groups received treatment using a rigorous consciousness-raising approach, the control groups received a milder version of it. It is found that effective acquisition took place and both the experimental and control groups show significant improvement in their performance. Where conditions of treatment were the same, students in the experimental group slightly outperformed those in the control group, suggesting that a model of remedial instruction structured in the form of proceduralized steps supported by explicit rules is more manageable and therefore more conducive to acquisition.