Focus On Form: Teaching The English Present Perfect Tense And Articles To Chinese Senior High School Students

Although plenty of theoretical and pedagogical studies have been conducted on the language teaching method of Focus on Form abroad, few have been made in China, especially on the two variants of this method:Isolated FonF and Integrated FonF. Yet new and more appropriate teaching methods are in need in China to meet the newly designed national English curriculum. Thus, the present study was employed to explore the appropriateness of the Focus-on-Form method for the curriculum and the relative strengths of its two variants when compared with each other.A total number of 239 students from 4 intact classes of 2 middle schools in Chongqing took part in the study at the very beginning. Due to absence from class, failure to complete assignments, and other non-researcher-biased reasons, some students were not selected as subjects so that the final total number of valid subjects was 225. Among the 4 classes, two were chosen randomly as the control classes, with 56 and 58 students respectively, but these two classes were treated similarly and regarded as one combined Control Class (CC),receiving the generally accepted mode of English teaching. The other two classes were treated as the Experimental Classes (ECs):IsFonF class and InFonF class, with 56 and 55 students, receiving English teaching by the methods of IsFonF and InFonF respectively. The two ECs got the same threshold level with the CC in English learning motivation, proficiency of the English present perfect tense and articles, teaching and learning materials, after-class assignments, English teachers'educational background and teaching experience, etc. The subjects'data were collected from questionnaires and tests, and analyzed with SPSS 16.0.The results showed that in both the Post-test and the Follow-up Post-test, the subjects of the two Experimental Classes when combined outperformed those of the Control Class, in their total scores and in their scores for each of the target grammatical items. In addition, when each of the two Experimental Classes was separately compared the Control Class, the subjects from either the IsFonF class or the InFonF class also performed significantly better than did those of the Control Class, in either the Post-test or the Follow-up Post-test. Moreover, when the two Experimental Classes were compared with each other, no significant difference was observed, in either the Post-test or the Follow-up Post-test, in their total scores or their scores for most of the target grammatical features.One important implication from the results is that in order to teach English grammar more effectively to Chinese senior high school students, the teacher should pay attention to the linguistic forms as well as the communicative functions of English.