The Effectiveness Of Focus On Form In Second Language Vocabulary Learning

As one of the most important components which mainly constitute English language knowledge, vocabulary is the foundation of all other English language skills. Due to the importance of vocabulary, more and more researchers pay their attention to the areas of vocabulary teaching and learning. Focus on form, which is a kind of instructional option put forward by Long, has been proved to be effective in grammar teaching and learning by a number of empirical and theoretical studies. There are few studies about the application of focus on form instruction into the vocabulary learning. According to Laufer (2003), since meaning-focused learning does not necessarily lead to a satisfactory vocabulary development, then a FoF component should be incorporated into vocabulary teaching and learning. Under this premise, the purpose of this research is to investigate the effectiveness of FoF instruction on L2vocabulary learning and to provide a more effective and efficient classroom pedagogical approaches to help students enhance their L2vocabulary acquisition. Accordingly, this study is designed to seek answers to the following two questions:A. Will FoF (Focus on Form) activities help students to acquire a significantly larger number of lexical items than FoM (Focus on Meaning) activities?B. To compare the two kinds of form-focused instructions, will FoF activities help students to acquire a significantly larger number of lexical items than FoFs (Focus on Forms) activities?Totally there are90Junior Three students learning English as a foreign language participating in the experiment. They come from three parallel classes and hence they have the similar English proficiency and have no differences in learning ability. Three classes were assigned randomly to one of the three conditions:thirty for FoM group, thirty for FoF group and thirty for FoFs group. The three groups receive different activities according to the experimental conditions they are assigned to. A pre-test was organized to31students of similar English proficiency who did not take part in the current experiment to make sure that the target items are totally new to the participants. Students in the FoM condition were exposed to the reading text which contained the target items. After reading, the participants were asked to finish two communicative tasks:reading comprehension and pair/group discussion. The questions of reading comprehension were designed on the basis of the understanding of the whole passage rather than the learning of the target items. In the FoF condition, the participants were exposed to the same reading text just as the FoM group, but the target items were underlined. After reading, participants in this group were asked to finish two tasks: reading comprehension and a text fill-in activity. Different from FoM condition, answering these questions required comprehension of the target items. The participants in FoFs condition received a list of the14target items with their translations instead of reading the text used in the other two groups. The participants in this group worked on a word-focused exercise---choosing the correct meaning of the word from four options. After the activities finished, all the three groups received an immediate post-test unexpectedly and a delayed post-test two weeks later. The experimental results show that two form-focused groups:FoF and FoFs performed better than FoM group in both immediate and delayed post-tests. Therefore, the author concluded that firstly, all the three groups (FoM group, FoF group and FoFs groups) gained some new vocabulary in different extent, but the FoM group got the lowest scores in tests; Secondly, among all the three groups students do much better in Test2(translation from L2-L1) than the Test1(translation from L1-L2), which means the learners accept the passive knowledge earlier and faster than the active knowledge; Thirdly, comparing with the FoFs group, FoF group performed better in the retention of vocabulary, thus a combination of FoF and FoFs could be a more efficient way in second language vocabulary learning.The thesis consists of five chapters:the first chapter is a brief introduction including the importance of vocabulary learning, a brief description of three pedagogical approaches (FoM, FoFs and FoF), and two research questions. The second chapter provides the literature review of the current research. Chapter three describes the research questions, participants, instruments, design and procedures of the experiment. And in chapter four, results and analysis of the experiment are presented. Chapter five makes a conclusion of the whole research, gives some suggestions for current English vocabulary teaching and learning, and finally points out the limitations of this study.