Enhancing Form–Meaning Connections in the Language Teaching of Children with Developmental Language Disorder: Evidence from Two Teaching Interventions

Focus on form (FonF) teaching interventions have been widely employed to help second language learners notice a target grammatical form while their attention is on meaning, i.e., establishing new form–meaning connections. These interventions can be input-based, focusing on the processing of input (i.e., Processing Instruction), or output-based, focusing on production within communicative activities (i.e., Dictogloss). The current pilot study explored whether such teaching interventions would be beneficial for children with DLD. The study employed Processing Instruction and Dictogloss for the teaching of passives in two groups of Greek school-aged children with DLD. The study applied pre-tests and (delayed) post-tests to explore (a) the potential (long-term) effectiveness of the interventions, and (b) potential differences in their effectiveness within this population. The findings indicate that both Processing Instruction and Dictogloss can be promising interventions for Greek children with DLD since they both led to learning gains and retention two weeks after the interventions across all tasks (comprehension, production, and sentence repetition). However, Dictogloss was more effective in production, while Processing Instruction in sentence repetition (when accuracy scores are measured).