Effects Of Timing Of Form-focused Instruction On Middle School Students’ English Grammar Acquisition

Grammar teaching is an indispensable part in foreign language teaching,but how to teach grammar more effectively is a question that many scholars have been exploring.Long（1991）proposed “Form-Focused Instruction”,which has been proved to be an effective teaching method by second language researchers.According to the timing of form-focused instruction,Spada and Lightbown（2008）divided form-focused instruction into Isolated and Integrated form-focused instruction.At present,there are many domestic studies on form-focused instruction,but studies on the the timing of form-focused instruction are less,the studies on students in Xinjiang are even less.In view of this,this study took Grade Eight students of X middle school in Urumqi,Xinjiang as the research subjects,and collected data through questionnaires and tests.Referred to the research design of Spada（2014）and File（2010）,Isolated form-focused instruction and Integrated form-focused instruction were implemented in two classes respectively,with the aim of investigating effects of timing of form-focused instruction on middle school students’ English grammar learning.The specific research questions are as follows:（1）What is the current situation of English grammar learning of Grade Eight students?（2）Which kind of timing of form-focused instruction（Isolated or Integrated）can improve students’ English grammar scores more significantly?（3）What is the effect of timing of form-focused instruction for students of different English level in grammar acquisition?The results showed that:（1）After the teaching experiment,more and more students attach importance to grammar learning,actively participate in the classroom and have the confidence to learn grammar well and enhance the interest in grammar learning.（2）Both Isolated and Integrated form-focused instruction can improve students’ English grammar score,but the former’s teaching effect is more significant.（3）At different timing,students with different English levels have different learning effects,high-level learners learn better than low-level learners at both timing of form-focused instruction.Therefore,in the classroom with uneven levels of students,teachers can adopt Isolated form focus instruction to satisfy the needs of learners at different levels.