112 CHAPTER 7 Departing from this foundation, DUB theories thus view language as a complex and dynamic system where form, use and meaning are integrated and continually interact and give rise to new utterances. PREVIOUS ECOLOGICALLY VALID AND LONG-TERM CLASSROOM RESEARCH DeKeyser and Botano (2019) qualify the number of articles reporting on classroom experiments as “…distressingly small from the point of view of practitioners eager for research ndings that can unambiguously inform their classroom teaching…” (p. 4) and the number of long-term studies as even smaller. In recent years, conscious e orts have been made to set-up and conduct studies that improve the ecological validity of this line of work: they implement long-term e ect studies re ective of the fact that educational programs usually last a number of years and use free response measures to avoid bias in measuring e ects. Two ecologically valid experiments within the Focus on Form (FonF) versus Focus on Forms (FonFs) debate show how important meaning-making is in language learning. Shintani (2013) compared the e ects of FonF and FonFS instruction on vocabulary acquisition. e learners in the FonF condition performed better in some respects. A detailed examination of classroom discourse indicated that the FonF condition provided opportunities for richer and more meaningful interaction in which the learners had to use their problem-solving skills more so than in the FonFs condition where meanings were given. Shintani (2015) examined children’s incidental grammar acquisition of two grammatical features—plural -s and copula be—in FonF and FonFs instruction. Children in the FonFs classroom acquired neither structure but children in the FonF classroom were able to use the plural -s. She reasoned that there had been a functional need to attend to plural -s (but not copula be) in the FonF discourse. Several long-term classroom studies have recently been conducted in the Dutch secondary school context. A classroom study by Piggott et al. (2020), for instance, involving 416 Dutch learners of L2 English, investigated the e ectiveness of a twoyear intervention with explicit grammar instruction versus an intervention without such explicit grammar instruction but with more authentic target exposure instead. e study involved two cohorts of learners, taught by the same teachers and on the basis of the same traditional SB-inspired textbook. However, in the implicit condition (i.e., the strong CLT approach), the pages focusing on and explaining grammatical features and structures were torn out and the teachers as part of this condition were instructed to avoid all explicit grammar instruction. As the teachers could thus not spend time explaining grammar, they typically spent more time on the reading and listening exercises in the book and, consequently, on providing more target language exposure. e results showed that the e ectiveness of the intervention method was
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