| English grammar penetrates all aspects of English learning and occupies a decisive position in improving the comprehensive competence of language use for English learners.In China,the effects of English grammar teaching in junior middle school is still unsatisfactory,what occurs frequently is the phenomena of students' language misuse and grammatical errors.In view of such a situation,the author tries to find a grammar teaching method which can neutralize the two extremes,thus,“focus on form”(FOF)attracts the author.FOF is not literally a teaching method mainly focusing on the grammar or other language forms but an instruction that integrates the teaching of language forms into communicative language classroom,and aims at improving learners' pragmatic competence on the premise that both language form and meaning are taken into account.FOF instruction has become one of the hot issues in the field of second language acquisition both at home and abroad,but previous empirical studies mostly concentrated on the effects of FOF on the participants' achievement on test for English grammatical knowledge and the change of emotional attitude,which inflects the need to further explore the development of grammatical knowledge in different dimensions.Grammatical knowledge has been divided into explicit and implicit dimensions by many researchers.Both of them,especially the implicit one play an essential role in the acquisition of a second language.Therefore,based on explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge,this paper attempts to validate the feasibility of FOF instruction applied in English grammar classroom teaching of junior middle school through experimental research,and intends to answer the following two research questions:1)What is the effect of FOF instruction applied in English grammar teaching on the development of junior middle school students' overall grammatical knowledge in terms of explicit and implicit aspects?2)What are the effects of FOF instruction applied in English grammar teaching on the development of junior middle school students' explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge respectively?76 students from two classes of Grade 7 in a junior middle school in Heyuan City were randomly selected as the experimental subjects in this study.38 students in the experimental group(EG)received FOF instruction in their grammar class,while 38 students in the control group(CG)received the PPP model in grammar classes.Four of the second-level grammar items in the English curriculum standard--tense,preposition,noun and pronoun were chosen as the target grammatical items.The experiment lasted for eight weeks(2018.10.23-2018.12.23),once a week.Before and after the experiment,untimed grammaticality judgement test was conducted in two groups to examine the development of students' explicit grammatical knowledge,while timed grammaticality judgement test was carried out to explore the development of students' implicit grammatical knowledge.After the experiment,6 subjects of the EG were interviewed to further demonstrate the results of the experiment.The results show that,firstly,FOF instruction promoted the development of overall grammatical knowledge in terms of explicit and implicit aspects for junior middle students.Secondly,FOF facilitated the development implicit grammatical knowledge for junior middle students.Thus FOF instruction is adaptable to develop grammatical knowledge for junior middle students.This study provides a new perspective and reference for the application of FOF in English grammar teaching for junior middle students.Meanwhile,there are also some limitations in this study,such as the number of participants lead to the limited representativeness of the experimental results,and the single measurement of explicit and implicit grammatical knowledge fails to obtain more reliable data.The author hopes that future research will be improved as appropriate. |
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