A Study Of The Application Of The Post-task Contrastive Focus On Form On High School English Vocabulary Teaching

This thesis has mainly studied the application of post-task contrastive focus on form in high school vocabulary teaching. The pervasive meaning-oriented classroom vocabulary teaching method emphasizes learning language through using it as much as possible without discrete explanation of the language forms. However, there are still some problems in second language learners. The learners can’t behave well when communicating in second language since they don’t understand the concrete and appropriate use of the second language. Besides, they are tending to follow the first language thinking model to use the second language. Therefore, language forms and cross-linguistic knowledge weigh a lot in learning second language vocabulary.Based on’noticing’ hypothesis, form focused instruction and ’task-induced involvement load’ hypothesis, the research questions are below:1) What are the learners’attitudes towards the application of the post-task contrastive focus on form in vocabulary learning?2) What are the differences among the immediate and delayed impacts of the following three teaching methods:post-task contrastive focus on form, the meaning-focused instruction and the focus on forms instruction on high school vocabulary acquisition?This experiment took three parallel classes (class 415 and class 417 and class 416) of Senior One in Qi Dong No.2 Middle School, Hunan Province, as the experiment-groups and the control-group adapting experiment teaching method and questionnaire.The statistics are gathered through vocabulary tests.Finally, the author analyzed the research data by adopting the One Way ANOVA.This study discovered that:1) The learners hold positive attitudes towards post-task contrastive focus on form in vocabulary learning, and they think it can improve their learning interest, the ability to oral production, writing ability, cross-cultural communication ability and last the vocabulary memory effect. It indicates that it is feasible to apply post-task contrastive focus on form in vocabulary teaching.2) There are differences among the impacts of the above mentioned three teaching methods on high school vocabulary acquisition. What’s more, the group of post-task contrastive focus on form got apparently higher scores than the other two groups in the two immediate vocabulary post-tests and two delayed vocabulary tests of the target words. The author hopes that this study can be beneficial for high school English teachers to realize the importance of post-task contrastive focus on form instruction in high school vocabulary teaching and that it can provide some references of English classroom teaching for the benefit of strengthening the usefulness of classroom teaching. There are also limitations of this study. First, word knowledge consists of many other elements, like asking the learner to provide a self-evaluation of whether they are familiar with the word or not. Though the hardest perspective of vocabulary, the active recall was tested here,further investigation should be carried out on other aspect of word knowledge. Secondly, the effects of other forms of form focused instruction should be also studied and compared by researchers.