"Focus On Form" Or "Focus On Forms"?

In recent years, studies of classroom interaction and negotiation of meaning has been gradually developed in China. Chinese researchers have been focusing on teacher's talk, IRF sequence, teacher's initiation and feedbacks. The New Standards of English Education at primary and secondary schools in China suggests that L2 education should be student-centered, that is, the current English education should take students as the main agents of the classroom activities rather than teachers. Long (1998) distinguished the two classroom approaches between"Focus-on-Form"and"Focus-on-Forms."According to Long (1998), Focus-on-Forms"abounds in L2 classrooms and involves a predominant, often exclusive orientation to a series of isolated linguistic forms presented one after the other, as in a structural syllabus, with meaning and communication relegated to the sidelines"; while Focus-on-Form happens when the learners'attentions were drawn to linguistic forms without breaking the on-going communication.This paper examines an average L2 classroom interaction, trying to examine the existence and the practicality of Focus-on-Form in secondary school environment. In order to have the research questions answered, this paper introduced Long's Interaction Hypothesis and his definition of Focus-on-Forms. By adopting Pica's generalization of the six linguistic features as the principle means of investigation, this paper tries to categorize and analyze the Focus-on-Form utterances both statistically and empirically. As the results indicate, although being only a relatively small amount of the entire classroom utterances, there do exist Focus-on-Form in L2 classrooms, whether the teacher being aware of the concept or not. Other than that, the efforts the teacher took in order to have her students'attention shift to the linguistic forms are also obvious. Thus it would be plausible to conclude that Focus-on-Form has already been identified by this teacher as one effective way in delivering her class. In the follow-up investigation, this paper tries to understand Focus-on-Form by investigating the"forms"it is used to emphasize. Of the four categories, this paper finds that Focus-on-Form was employed to direct the students'attention to word forms, verbal inflection as well as modal verbs. No other linguistics forms were found to be emphasized. This paper then continues to analyze every single utterances in terms of the"forms"they are related, trying to present how they are being modified by the teachers in order to have the students'attention directed to them.The result of this paper confirms the existence of Focus-on-Form in an average L2 classroom, which suggests that in other similar classrooms, there would be this kind of form-meaning negotiation too. This study finds out some of the differences between western L2 classrooms practice of Focus-on-Form. In the previous studies conducted by Pica, Lyster, etc. no additional form-focused instructions of interventions were found immediately to be presented when right answers were provided by the students.The implication of this study is, with all the studies have been carried out to investigate how Focus-on-Form is operated at L2 classrooms, no further investigation in terms of its effectiveness was found. With all the theoretical reviews and relevant field research carrying out in different L2 classrooms, it is necessary that some feedback research to be conducted.