Incidental focus-on-form in a free discussion language class: types, linguistic foci and uptake rate

This study investigated incidental focus-on-form in a free discussion English as a foreign language (EFL) class with no pre-selected syllabus. Fifteen hours of classroom interactions in an upper-intermediate class with 15 homogeneous adult learners were audio-recorded and analysed. The participants also completed separate uptake sheets for each session. The occurrence of incidental reactive and pre-emptive focus-on-form episodes (FFEs), their linguistic foci and the rate of uptake were then calculated. The findings revealed that incidental FFEs, in general, and pre-emptive FFEs, in particular, occurred very frequently in this class. The highest rate of FFEs was found to be related to lexical items, while the lowest rate dealt with pronunciation. The analysis of the uptake sheets as well as the audio-recorded data revealed that vocabulary enjoyed the highest rate of uptake and grammar the lowest. This study also found that multiple uptake moves simultaneously occurred for some FFEs with apparently one linguistic focus. There were also some instances of lexical and phonological uptake moves with no apparent FFEs. It is argued that rich meaningful contexts may lead to uptake moves on the part of learners, obviating the need for an excessive number of teacher-initiated FFEs.