An Empircal Study On The Effects Of Focus-On-Form Instruction Upon The Acquisition Of English Partial Inversion

There is a strong tendency in current college English teaching in China that meaning and function of the language are stressed while instruction on form is ignored or even abandoned. As a result, the fluency of learners'output has been improved considerably, but the accuracy is far from satisfactory. The instructional model of Focus on Form put forward by Long is supposed to promote both fluency and accuracy simultaneously, which advocates the integration of form instruction into meaning or communication-oriented context and has become one of the heatedly discussed issues in second language acquisition and instruction abroad in recent years.Focus on Form overtly draws students'attention to linguistic elements as they arise incidentally in lessons whose overriding focus is on meaning or communication. Thus based on'noticing hypothesis'and other relative theories, the present quasi-experimental study investigated the effects of Focus on Form (FonF) instruction on promoting Chinese non-English majors'awareness and accuracy of partial inversion in terms of the following two hypotheses:1. Learners who have received FonF Instruction show higher awareness of partial inversion than those who have received communicative treatment.2. Learners who have received FonF Instruction outperform those who have received communicative treatment in the acquisition of partial inversion.The present study involves four phases, namely a pretest, instructional treatment, a posttest and a delayed posttest. The results indicated that FonF instruction is more effective in promoting learners'awareness and accurate use of partial inversion. In addition, this study discussed two factors that may affect the effectiveness of FonF instruction, namely learners'prior knowledge about the target form and teachers'consistent instruction about it. This study suggests three important pedagogical implications:(1) FonF instruction is feasible in Chinese EFL classrooms;(2) The combination of input and output enhancement is necessary and effective during FonF instruction in English teaching in EFL context;(3) Both teachers and learners shall be acquainted with techniques and strategies employed during meaning/form negotiation or interaction.As this quasi-experimental research only verified the effect of FonF instruction on promoting learners'awareness and acquisition of a single form in college English teaching and all the tests are in written form, the generalizablity of the results in this study has to be tested in future research.