An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of The Proactive FonF Instruction On Junior High School Students' Acquisition Of The English Past Tense

Foreign language(English)teaching has gone through three major stages: from focus on forms(FonFs),focus on meaning(FonM),to focus on form(FonF).Because FonFs or FonM will make students excessively concentrate either on the form or on the meaning of a foreign language,researchers gradually realize that only the combination of form and meaning teaching can promote learners‘ foreign language acquisition.As a result,the FonF Instruction(Long 1991)came into being,later it was further divided into the proactive FonF(PFonF)instruction and reactive FonF(RFonF)instruction(Doughty & Williams 1998).Through empirical research,this thesis explores the influence of the explicit PFonF(EPFonF)instruction and the implicit PFonF(IPFonF)instruction on junior high school students‘ learning the simple past tense,and demonstrates the different effects of the two instructions on junior high school students‘ perception and production of the simple past tense.The subjects were 105 students from two parallel classes in the eighth grade of a junior high school in Yueyang.The two classes were used as EG and CG.The whole experimental period is eight weeks and the experimental teaching project is the simple past tense.The specific teaching content of the grammar project not only refers to the content of the textbook,but also refers to The Compulsory Education English Curriculum Standard(Ministry of Education 2017).The thesis manages to answer the following three research questions:1)What are the effects of the EPFonF Instruction and the IPFonF Instruction on junior high school students‘ perception of the simple past tense of English verbs?2)What are the effects of the EPFonF Instruction and the IPFonF Instruction on junior high school students‘ production of the simple past tense of English verbs?3)What differences exist in the long-term effects of the EPFonF Instruction and the IPFonF Instruction on junior high school students‘ acquisition of the simple past tense of English verbs?The experiment conducts three tests,including a pre-test,an immediate post-test and a delayed post-test,in order to analyze the different results of the two teaching methods.Through the collection and analysis of data,the experimental results and findings are as follows:1)The students who accept the EPFonF Instruction perform better in the perception of the simple past tense in the immediate post-test.2)The students who accept the IPFonF Instruction perform better in the production of the simple past tense in the immediate post-test.3)The long-term effect of the IPFonF Instruction is obviously better than that of the EPFonF Instruction in the delayed post-test.Based on the above experimental results,we can conclude that the EPFonF Instruction and the IPFonF Instruction are effective in teaching English grammar in junior high schools.However,their effects on the students‘ perception and production are different.Therefore,in the future teaching,different teaching methods can be applied to different teaching objectives and teachers can also integrate the two teaching methods in their English grammar teaching.