The Impact Of Focus On Form On The Accurate Output Of Past Tense

In current non-English major college teaching in China, a common phenomenon is that although many students have mastered a great deal of grammatical knowledge and vocabulary with at least 6 years of studies, most of them are still unable to use English communicatively. Their ability in language production is very low. Although communicative ability is emphasized in the current English language teaching. The methodology, however, has changed from a focus on the grammar sructure of the language to a focus on communicative competence. However, in the meaning-focused instruction, fluency of language is the main goal of teaching while accuracy is often overlooked. The problem now is how to achieve the goal of fluency and accuracy at the same time. Some researchers such as Long forwarded an instructional model Focus on Form, which emphasizes both forms and meaning in language teaching instruction. Focus on Form is attracting more and more attention in SLA abroad and at home. Considering the low output ability of Chinese college students, the author assumes that FonF teaching model will be helpful for teaching college non-English major students in China.Since 1990s, there have been a lot of studies on the roles and effects of FonF abroad. Some researchers at home applied FonF pedagogical techniques such as Input enhancement, Consciousness- raising (CR) tasks while this study applied the combination of output enhancement and interaction enhancement on Chinese College non-English major teaching considering the students'low proficiency of output. Past tense is often used and the learners often make mistakes when they produce it. For non-English major college students, although they have learned past tense since they began studying English, their output ability of past tense is far behind the knowledge they have grasped. Therefore this quasi-experimental study is to investigate the effect of Focus on Form on the accurate past tense output of Chinese non-major college students. The theoretical foundations are information processing model from psycholinguistic perspective, Noticing Hypothesis, from cognitive perspective and Interaction Hypothesis from pedagogical perspective.The author conducts an empirical study based on the research purpose and applies different teaching instructions. The students in the experimental group have Focus-on-Form instruction while the control group is conducted with only meaning-focus instruction. Subjects are 53 non-English-major sophomores from a Chinese university. This study designs pretest, immediate posttest and delayed posttest with oral description, written description and grammaticality judgment test. Results reveal that Focus on Form instruction for foreign languge teaching improves the students'output ability on past tense form. Although the present research shows positive theoretical and empirical effects of using focus-on-form instruction to teach non-English major college students in China, more other techniques and tasks using different grammatical forms under various teaching context need to be used to examine applicability of FonF instruction.