An Empirical Study Of The Effects Of Fon F Instruction On Junior High Students' Acquisition Of The English Passive Voice

Grammar learning is an important part of English learning,and there are different opinions about grammar teaching.Learning grammar is helpful for students to understand and use language better.Traditional grammar teaching stresses teachers' explanations of grammar rules and students' mechanical practices,and it overemphasizes the grammatical forms and neglects the practical application.Long(1990)proposes the Focus on Form Instruction(the FonF instruction),which is regarded as a new teaching method has received much attention.The FonF instruction focus on shifting students' attention properly and timely to grammatical forms in meaningful interactions.At present,there are more theoretical but less empirical studies on the FonF instruction,and those focused on the teaching of the specific grammatical items are limited.In this study,40 students from each of two parallel classes in Grade 2 of No.9 Middle School in Pingjiang County,Hunan Province are chosen as subjects.Based on the Noticing hypothesis and Interaction hypothesis,the present study takes English passive voice as the target grammar structure and is designed to explore the effects of the FonF instruction on junior high school students' acquisition of the English passive voice.This thesis aims to answer the following tworesearch questions:1)What is the difference between the FonF instruction and the FonFs instruction in students' perception of the English passive voice in junior high schools?2)What is the difference between the FonF instruction and the FonFs instruction in students' production of the English passive voice in junior high schools?Through the analysis of the experimental results,two conclusions can be drawn:In terms of the first question,after six weeks' pedagogical instructions,the students' comprehension of the English passive voice is improved in both two classes.Although the students in the experimental class perform better,the gap between the two classes is not obvious.In the aspect of the English passive voice production,the students of the two classes have made progress,but the students in the experimental class have made greater progress,and the difference between the experimental class and the control class is significant.Therefore,we can get a conclusion that the FonF instruction can promote students to comprehend and produce the English passive voice in junior high schools.And it has been proved to be feasible and effective in practical teaching.Although this thesis confirms the validity of the FonF instruction,for the limitations of this research as the short period of teachingexperiment and small sample size,the reliability and validity of the experimental results need to be verified by more relevant studies.