Focus on form (FonF), also called form-focused instruction, is an approach to language education in which learners are made aware of linguistic forms – such as individual words and conjugations – in the context of a communicative activity.
[3] The concept of focus on form was motivated by the lack of support for the efficacy of focus on forms on the one hand, and clear advantages demonstrated by instructed language learning over uninstructed learning on the other.
[3] The research conflicting with focus on forms has been wide-ranging;[4] learners typically acquire language features in sequences, not all at once,[5] and most of the stages the learners' interlanguages pass through will exhibit non-native-like language forms.
[6] Furthermore, the progression of these stages is not clean; learners may use language features correctly in some situations but not in others,[7] or they may exhibit U-shaped learning, in which native-like use may temporarily revert to non-native-like use.
[3] An important finding that supported Long's view came from French language immersion programs in Canada; even after students had years of meaning-focused lessons filled with comprehensible input, their spoken language remained far from native-like, with many grammatical errors.