A Study On Focus On Form In College English Classroom

In the past several decades, one of the major changes in second language instruction is the shift in teaching methodology--- from a focus on the structural properties of the target language to an emphasis on communicative competence and comprehension of meaning. However, in the meaning-focused instruction, accuracy is often overlooked and fluency is emphasized. More and more recent findings of classroom research have indicated that pedagogical interventions embedded in primarily communicative activities can be effective in overcoming classroom limitations on Second Language Acquisition. Therefore, there has been an instructional model to incorporate form without isolating it from communication, namely, Focus on Form. Focus on Form has become one of current issues in SLA and the author believes that FonF is the suitable model for college English teaching and the study on it can give some enlightenment to college English teaching.This study is significant and has some advantages. First of all, most studies have been done to the beginner-level learners. My study aims to investigate the roles and effects of focus-on-form instruction in college English context. Secondly, the existing studies that relate to the effects of FonF are mainly about listening and writing production; few of the studies are involved in speaking production. This study attempts to fill this gap. Thirdly, the target forms in this study are lexical phrases, which is the distinguishing feature of this paper. Lastly, among language teachers and researchers in China, there is a strong call on innovations in college English teaching and focus-on-meaning instruction is taking a dominant role. However, FonM Instruction has insufficiency. Therefore, this paper can arouse attention of college teachers in China to forms.The theoretical foundations of FonF instruction are'a weak-interface' hypothesis from psycholinguistic perspective,'noticing'hypothesis from cognitive perspective and'interaction'hypothesis from pedagogical perspective respectively.According to the research questions, the author has an empirical study. In the treatment stage, two groups are provided with different treatments respectively. They are an experimental group, focusing on both forms and meaning, and a control group, focusing on meaning alone. The instruments of data collection and analysis mainly employed in this study are testing and interviews. The whole study lasts 12 weeks, which are divided into 5 phases. After each phase, there is an oral posttest and a writing posttest respectively in order to compare the performance of two groups. On the basis of results of this experiment, the author draws the following conclusions. 1) FonF instruction can work more efficiently in improving accuracy of learners'production than FonM instruction. 2) FonF instruction can increase learners'noticing of the target forms and improve the learning of the forms. This study provides some pedagogical implications and suggestions for language teaching in college English context.