The Effects Of Focus On Form On Chinese Students' Acquisition Of English Relative Clauses

Grammar teaching always plays a central role in second language pedagogy. Much attention has been granted to focus on forms (FoFS) or meaning (FoM). By contrast, Focus-on-form (FoF) has combined the advantages of these two approaches. Ample empirical studies tend to support FoF, yet a number of studies are still in favor of FoFS.To gain a better understanding of the ongoing debate, the present study has zeroed in on the issue of accuracy as opposed to fluency. For a display of instructional effects, the English Relative Clause (RC) was selected as the target grammatical structure because both the command of its meaning and form present learners with difficulties and this structure was rarely discussed in previous comparative studies on effects of FoF and FoFS.This thesis intends to address the research question: In what ways is FoF more effective than FoFS in improving Chinese intermediate-level students' accuracy in producing English RCs? This study was largely an action research applying quantitative and qualitative methods. A sample of 32 Chinese intermediate-level participants was recruited from a continuing education college of Shanghai to receive instruction on English RCs for two weeks. The experimental group was given FoF treatment and the control group FoFS. A pretest and a posttest with a questionnaire were administered.Firstly, the independent-samples t-test on the pretest scores of the two groups indicates no significant difference in subjects'proficiency level in English RCs before instruction. Secondly, the paired-sample t-test on the pre- and the posttest scores of the experimental group shows that FoF subjects obtained higher scores in the posttest than in the pretest. Likewise, the same statistical analysis on the control group demonstrates that FoFS subjects scored higher in the posttest. These results imply that both approaches helped improve subjects'accuracy in producing English RCs. However, the one-way ANOVA on the posttest scores of the two groups reveals that the FoFS subjects outscored those under FoF after the instruction. This indicates that FoF was not as effective as FoFS in improving subjects' accuracy in producing English RCs. Thirdly, the one-way ANOVA was performed on the posttest scores of three error-prone aspects of the two groups. According to the results, no significant difference was detected in effects of these two approaches on avoiding non-adjacency errors. However, FoF is not as effective as FoFS in facilitating students' selection of the right relative clause markers and avoidance of pronoun retention. An error analysis unfolds that both approaches were helpful with subjects' processing strategies of form and meaning. Under FoF, the attention to meaning seemed to take precedence over form, but under FoFS it turned out to be the opposite. And the results from the questionnaire display the subjects' difficulties in allocating their limited attentional resources.In conclusion, it is admitted that through integrating formal instruction into communicative tasks FoF has its advantages over earlier approaches such as FoM and FoFS. However, the findings from this study indicate that we should adopt a critical attitude towards any new proposal for grammar teaching in SLA by viewing it as a way of revising not excluding old methods.In summary, the author suggested that under FoF the teacher's corrective feedback should make up the limitations of students' processing of grammatical forms and ensure their acquisition of grammatical rules in order to improve the accuracy of their production.