| In China,the role of grammar teaching in primary English teaching has always been precarious.Hence there exist two extreme situations in primary English grammar teaching.One group emphasizes the cultivation of students’ communicative competences,they believe that as long as there is enough stimulation of communicative language environment,students can naturally acquire the grammatical forms and knowledge without the teachers explaining the grammar rules,yet the result is full of grammatical errors made in students’ oral expression and written practices.The other group overemphasizes grammar teaching in high-grade English class,gradually they teach grammar in a fixed format: present the grammatical rules firstly,then explain them,and finally do some drills.In this way,although students’ grammar scores are increased,their learning interest declined.Long(1991)firstly proposed the Focus on Form(Fo F)instruction.It not only attaches importance to the communication of grammatical meaning but also emphasizes the attention to linguistic form,so as to make up for the defects of one-sided attention to meaning or form.Since the Fo F was proposed,it had received extensive attention from linguists at home and abroad.Due to the limited school hours,the students’ cognition model and the pressure from the entrance examination,the author tries to carry out Fo F instruction in grammar.Looking at the domestic and foreign literature review of Fo F,the author finds that there were many theoretical and empirical studies on Fo F abroad,but most of them are empirical studies on Fo F on L2 vocabulary acquisition,and there were few empirical studies on grammar teaching,and most of their foreign studies were based on the L2 environment,which is different from the actual situation of foreign language teaching in China.On the other hand,there were many empirical studies on Fo F on English grammar teaching in China,most of which were some master’s theses.In these master’s theses,most of the research subjects were junior high school students and high school students,while the applied researches on the application of Fo F on English grammar teaching in primary schools has only found three through the search of CNKI,and most of the target forms of their research was mostly English past tense.Therefore,this experiment takes the Noticing Hypothesis and the Interaction Hypothesis as the theoretical basis.According to the pupils’ special cognition mode,taking “there be” pattern as an example,the Fo F is used to guide explicit grammar instruction in primary schools.The purpose of this experiment is to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the Fo F applied in the explicit grammar instruction in primary schools.The following two research questions are specifically raised:Firstly,whether the Fo F can be used to guide the explicit grammar instruction in primary school?Secondly,among Fo F and Fo Fs,which one is more conductive to guide the explicit grammar instruction in primary school?The research subjects are students of two classes from grade 5 in a center primary school in Jiangxi province.Among them,class 2 is the experimental class,whereas class1 is regarded as the control class.The number of students in both classes is 62.In addition,the results of interviews,teaching materials,teaching progress,and teachers in the experimental and control classes before teaching “there be” pattern were the same.The difference is that in the experimental process,the control class would use the traditional Fo Fs for explicit grammar instruction,including:presentation-practice-production;while the experimental class adopts the Fo F for explicit grammar instruction,in which the dictogloss task,negotiation of meaning and negative feedback would be used.This experiment abandons the previous questionnaires and tests,and attempts to collect data in primary schools by using interviews,oral examinations,and correcting written assignments.The research results reveal that in whatever aspect,the experimental class is superior of the control class.On the one hand,it proves that Fo F can be used to guide explicit grammar instruction in primary schools.On the other hand,it shows that compared with the Fo Fs,the Fo F is more conductive to guide explicit grammar instruction in primary schools.Of course,there are some limitations in the research,providing some suggestions for further research. |
