The Effects Of Integrated And Isolated Form-Focused Instruction On English Passive Voice Learning Of Middle School Students

Grammar teaching is one of the most important aspects of foreign language teaching,and how to make grammar teaching more effective has always been the focus of teachers and researchers at home and abroad.In the 1990 s,Long proposed form-focused instruction(FFI),which emphasizes attention to language forms in a meaning-centered classroom to acquire the target language.Its role in foreign language teaching has been proven by researchers.Spada and Lightbown(2008)further put forward integrated and isolated form-focused instruction according to the timing of form-focused instruction.At present,researchers have not yet reached a consensus on which form-focused instruction is more effective,and few studies have been conducted in China on the effects of the timing of FFI on grammar learning.To explore the impacts of the timing of FFI on junior high school students’ English grammar learning,this study conducted a six-week teaching experiment using English passive voice as the target grammar in two eighth-grade classes in a Guangzhou middle school.During this period,the students in the two classes were taught the passive voice by integrated FFI and isolated FFI,and the only difference in the two classes is the timing of focusing on form.Based on the attention hypothesis and the input processing theory,this study tries to answer the following two questions:(1)What are the effects of integrated FFI and isolated FFI on English passive voice learning of middle school English learners?(2)What are the effects of integrated FFI and isolated FFI on the learning of English passive voice for students of different levels?In addition to conducting grammar instruction,this study also adopted a pretest,timely post-test,delayed post-test,and semi-structured interview to collect data.It is found that:(1)Both form-focused instructions can promote students’ passive voice learning,and the isolated FFI on immediate and delayed effects is better than the integrated FFI.(2)For high-level learners,both timing of FFI can significantly improve their English passive voice performance,but the immediate and delayed effects of the isolated FFI are better than those of the integrated FFI;For low-level learners,the immediate effect of isolated FFI is better,but there is no significant difference in the delayed effect between the two types of focus timing.FFI can promote middle school students’ grammar learning,and teachers can implement FFI in grammar instruction.In classes with a large gap in students’ English proficiency,isolated FFI is more effective in teaching grammar.Teachers should carefully design classroom activities to attract students’ attention to the target grammar.