Meaning Of The Precursor Form In The Center Of The Efl Classroom Environment Focused Teaching

Influenced by some theories in SLA, form-focused instruction (especially the grammar-centered one) has been weakened significantly in EFL setting in China. Many teachers emphasize the importance of "communication" while ignoring the study of linguistic forms and the correction of various grammatical mistakes in language output. As a result, while the learner's understanding and expression of the degree of fluency may be closer to English natives, their language accuracy and delicacy is unsatisfactory, and even interlanguage petrochemical phenomenon appears.Since the early 1990s, focus-on-form (FOF)—incorporation of form-focused instruction into communicative language teaching, has become a hot issue to both SLA researchers and language teachers. The research of FOF has been proved to accelerate the development of interlanguage system and thereby facilitate language acquisition theoretically and pedagogically. A new teaching mode based on the above concept has become an international mainstream. In recent years, related research and review have appeared in China.FOF consists of reactive type and preemptive one. The former amounts to corrective feedback, the latter is 'occasions when either the teacher or a student chose to make a specific form the topic of the discourse' .Whereas previous research both at home and abroad addressed reactive FOF, the study of preemptive FOF is rare, especially in China. The present study chooses to focus on preemptive FOF episodes because the researcher realizes that preemptive FOF consists of student-initiated ones which lead to more successful uptake and provide more opportunities for correct output, therefore facilitate language acquisition.The present study aims to describe preemptive FOF episodes in foreign language classroom. This study, adopting the descriptive(i.e., qualitative and quantitative) research methodology and using as the case two experienced college EFL teachers, explores preemptive FOF episodes in oral English lessons which were observed and audio-recorded (160minutes).The major finding includes: 1) a FOF occurs at a rate of 1 every 2.1 minutes, 37% are preemptive, 63% are reactive; 2) teacher-initiated FOF episodes are more than student-initiated FOF episodes, which is 68% and 32% respectively; 3) the percentage of successful uptake in student-initiated FOF episodes is higher than in teacher-initiated, which is 88.9% and 37.5% respectively, 4) the majority of the preemptive FOF episodes were dealing with vocabulary and grammar, which is 39.3% and 25% respectively.