Effects of Focus on form in a cross-cultural interaction project on the development of Japanese EFL learners' English Proficiency

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This study examines the impact of reformulation as a focus-on-form treatment on the development of Japanese learners' English proficiency. Reformulation is an instructional treatment that guides learners to focus on form by rewriting learners' essays, preserving all the learners' ideas. Reformulation is thought to be effective for second language development because it provides learners with both implicit negative evidence that some forms are non-targetlike as well as positive evidence of how the idea can be expressed in a targetlike manner (Adams, 2003). Reformulation, in other words, functions as a written recast that gives learners opportunities to test their interlanguage hypothesis. In this study, reformulation was incorporated into an authentic language use project in which 22 Japanese university students communicated in English with their Korean counterparts. Over a period of two months, participants exchanged a-mails in English on assigned topics such as pop culture, job-huntin … More g situations, military services, and Japanese-Korean relations. The present researcher assisted Japanese participants in their writing by reformulating a portion of the e-mails. In order to examine the effects of reformulation, the Japanese learners' English proficiency was measured with writing tests and two grammar tests in a pre-test, post-test design. The participants' writings were evaluated in terms of fluency (wpm, lexical frequency profile), accuracy (the incidence of errors per t-unit)and complexity(the average number of words per t-unit). Results revealed that reformulation as a focus-on-form treatment was effective for developing Japanese EFL learners' fluency, grammatical accuracy, and complexity in their use of written English. In this research, it was also made clear that cross-cultural communication between Japanese and Korean university students in English promoted Japanese students' motivation for using their own English actively and mutual understanding between Japanese and Korean university students. Less