FonF: A Dual Confession

I must confess (#1) that as a second-year graduate student in UB's ESOL program, the first chapter of Robert J. Blake's Brave New Digital Classroom: Technology and Foreign Language Learning wasn't extremely insightful.  But that's okay, because the chapter is a self-proclaimed overview of technology and SLA teaching, and as an overview it was certainly... broad. 

There was one strategy mentioned, however, that I did find intriguing.  In his presentation of technology as it applies to SLA theory (or, the other way around), Blake describes a pedagogical methodology known as Focus on Form, or FonF (p. 19).  Using this method, teachers invite students to solve specific linguistic tasks, and in doing so facilitate a collaboration between ELs who "focus on the source of their linguistic confusions (e.g., vocabulary, morphology, syntax), negotiate their incomplete understandings, and, consequently, analyze their own language" (p. 19).  This approach caught my attention primarily because it could constitute as an inductive learning activity, which is in my opinion a very reliable and motivating way to engage students with the language.  I began thinking of activities using FonF, and became increasingly excited as I considered the creative potential.  For example, imagine how much fun groups of students would have unscrambling sentences to find the next clue in a scavenger hunt, while they also inductively determined and produced correct SVO syntactic arrangement of English sentences!

Then I remembered this book was about integrating technology into L2 instruction...


Imagine an online scavenger hunt, where each website (a simple page, created by the teacher and hosted by the school) contained grammatical errors that needed to be identified and corrected in order to reveal the next website.  Imagine an interactive wiki of some culturally-relevant text that students can edit together, with the purpose of submitting the finished product to Wikipedia.  Imagine another wiki, this time an ongoing story, flourishing with various linguistic devices and written collaboratively by each and every student.  Imagine a teacher who tweets error-filled sentences that can be corrected and submitted for bonus points, even when school isn't in session!


Really, the possibilities are endless (<-- becoming a recurring phrase in these discussions...), and I must confess (#2), I'm excited to see what Blake has to say in the chapters that aren't an overview.