A Study of Form-focused Instruction on L2 Academic Vocabulary Learning

While the literature extensively discusses the benefits of form-focused instruction for grammatical aspects, limited research has explored its impact on L2 academic vocabulary acquisition. This study investigates the effects of two types of focus-on-form within the framework of the task-induced involvement hypothesis (fill-in-the-blanks with L1 and L2 glosses) and two types of focus-on-forms (non-contrastive and contrastive) on academic vocabulary learning. In the focus-on-form tasks, participants were asked to read a passage and fill in eleven gaps using either L1 or L2 glosses from provided word lists. The non-contrastive focus-on-forms group involved recognizing the meaning of target words and completing a sentence activity using L2 glosses, while the contrastive focus-on-forms group involved translating sentences from L2 to L1 and vice versa. The results show that the contrastive focus-on-forms group achieved the highest learning gains, followed by the non-contrastive focus-on-forms group and the focus-on-form group with L1 glosses. In terms of proficiency levels, low-level students benefited more from focus-on-form tasks, particularly when using L1 glosses. Conversely, intermediate and high-level students gain more from focus-on-forms tasks. The study discusses the theoretical and pedagogical implications of these findings.