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.