82 CHAPTER 5 DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION In the Dutch context, teachers prefer to hold to traditional ideas about FL instruction with a great deal of explicit attention to forms because they fear that students will be less accurate if they do not. Especially for writing, the argument has been that explicit attention to morphosyntax is needed to achieve accuracy (Fayol, 1997; Barbier, 1997; Gunnarson, 2012; Ellis &Wul , 2015; Hulstijn, 2015). e current study was designed to test this assumption and compared learners on French writing skills in two di erent FL teaching programs--a structure based (SB) and a dynamic usage-based (DUB) program- -a er six years of high school instruction in the Netherlands. In line with Long (2000), the SB program could be considered a Focus on Forms approach with explicit explanations in the L1 on French grammar and relatively little true exposure in the FL, especially in the rst three years. e DUB program could be considered a Focus on Form approach with implicit attention to form and a great amount of FL exposure and use. e most interesting nding was that the SB and DUB groups did not di er much at all in holistic ratings given by a group of experts, in the pro ciency level score produced by Direkt Pro l, which included many accuracy measures, nor in the two speci c accuracy measures focused on a great deal in the SB classes: subject-verb agreement and determiner-noun agreement. With regard to speci c CAF measures, the results show a di erence between the approaches. e DUB learners produced longer texts, which may be a general indicator for uency, and longer sentences, which is a general indicator of sentence complexity. In a study on the same students (Chapter 6), we also found di erences in chunks. e DUB learners used longer and more lexically based chunks, and therefore relatively more words that could be classi ed as part of chunks than the students in the SB condition (d = 0.73, p<0.05). is was clearly illustrated by the two examples in the previous section which showed a higher chunk coverage of the DUB student. When we relate these ndings to the literature reviewed, the results of this study clearly align with previous classroom studies conducted in Dutch secondary schools (cf. Andringa et al., 2011; Piggott et al., 2020; Rousse-Malpat et al. 2022) with regard to complexity and uency. In all studies, the implicit teaching programs appear to be as e ective as explicit teaching programs. As for accuracy in writing, Piggott et al. (2020) reported that students in the explicit condition performed better on accuracy measures, while in this study students in the implicit condition performed better on complexity and uency measures and equally well on accuracy measures. is seems logical as the implicit group in the Piggott et al. (2020) study was tested a er two years, while in this study, students were tested a er six years, and as Rousse-Malpat and Verspoor
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