The Focus Of The Teaching On The General Past

Focus on form was proposed by Long in 1991.Long characterizes two essential features of focus on form:(1) Attention to form occurs in lessons where the overriding focus is on meaning or communication;(2) Attention to form arises incidentally in response to communicative need. Other researchers expanded the concept of this terminology. This present study adopts learners of Junior High school students in Grade two as subjects, and English simple Past as target form in order to test the immediate effect of focus on form on the learning of English simple past in EFL context in China.The experiment is designed three stages:pretest, instructional treatment and posttest. The instructional treatment lasts five weeks. The subjects are 80 students from Grade two, with 40 in experiment group and control group respectively. The tool used in pretest and posttest are grammar judgment test, written and oral production. During instructional treatment, the teacher makes students of experiment group receive focus on form instruction; students of control group, however, receive focus on meaning instruction. After 5 weeks, the data of posttest shows that for the learning of simple past in general, the experiment outperforms the control group.Therefore, the major findings attained in this study are:(1) In Chinese EFL context, focus on form instruction is more effective than focus on meaning as to the learning of English simple past of regular verbs;(2) Focus on form instruction does not have advantage against focus on meaning instruction with regard to the learning of English simple past of irregular verbs. These findings have pedagogical implications for the practice of focus in Chinese EFL context. At last, the limitations of the study and suggestions for future study are pointed out.