Detection and Grammaticality Judgment of Forms in a Language Education System Oriented for Focus on Form

This paper describes how to develop a language education system oriented for a pedagogical approach called focus on form (FonF). FonF aims at improving skills to produce grammatically correct sentences. The approach has attracted much attention in the field of second language education because it could overcome a potential problem of another pervasively adopted approach called communicative approach (CA). The CA puts the highest priority on cultivating communicative fluency and grammatical correctness is considered less important than conveying intention. As a result, there is a risk that learners would miss a chance to correct their misunderstanding of grammatical rules in target languages. If FonF instruction is effectively incorporated into a language education system oriented for the CA, it should overcome the problem by giving appropriate grammatical instruction while learners are engaging in conversation practice based on the CA. In this study, we selected 145 linguistic forms to teach based on the FonF approach and implemented functions necessary for FonF instruction: a function to detect the linguistic forms in input sentences, and a function to judge whether detected forms are used correctly from the viewpoints of morphosyntactic correctness and semantic correctness.