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© Oxford University Press 2005
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Tangled up in form: Critical comments on ‘Teachers’ stated beliefs about Incidental Focus on Form and their Classroom Practices' by Basturkmen, Loewen, and Ellis
This response article addresses two issues raised by the publication of Basturkmen et al. (2004). The most important one concerns the nature of the research itself, whilst the other relates to the relevance of the purpose of the research to the aims of the involvement of applied linguistics in second and foreign language teaching. As to the first, we argue initially that it is of highly questionable value to carry out research on a teaching approach in a situation in which that approach is not implemented and, subsequently, we contend that the authors' analyses of the three ‘focus on form episodes’ are deeply flawed, thus provoking serious doubt as to the reliability of the findings. As to the second, we claim that before we address teachers' beliefs about the foundations of a particular approach, applied linguists need to give priority to comparative research which aims to demonstrate the relative merits of different approaches in various situations. We conclude by arguing that this very evident priority has been largely neglected by the field in favour of devoting valuable resources to peripheral issues which ill-serve the needs of the field of second and foreign language teaching.
Received December 2004.