On the Effectiveness of Focus-on-form and Meaning-focused Instruction in an Elementary EFL Course: Does Cognitive Style of Field-dependence/ Independence Play a Role?

One of the topics which preoccupied the language teaching circles for a while is the Focus-on-form (FOF) instruction. Many English teachers and researchers praised it as if it were the miracle method they had always been searching for and many research projects have tried to prove it is more effective than meaning-focused (MF) instruction and some researches also attributed the effectiveness of FOF instruction to the way it is performed and the personality factors of learners and teachers. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of FOF and MF instruction in EFL settings and especially for elementary learners which are in a more crucial need of developing a grammatical competence in the foreign language and further to investigate the role of the cognitive style of field-dependence/independence in the effectiveness of both kinds of instruction. The results of the study confirm the previous research which has shown the effectiveness of FOF over MF instruction. The results further indicate that field-independent learners can benefit more from both FOF and meaning-focused instruction, and there is no interaction between the cognitive style of FD/FI and FOF/MF instruction.