A Case Study Of Preemptive FonF Instruction In Meaning-focused Senior High English Classes

Language form is an important component of language teaching. Since the early1990s, how to incorporate form-focused instruction into communicative language teaching has become a heated topic among second language researchers and language teachers. It is not until Long (1988) advanced Focus on Form (FonF) that this problem becomes possible to be solved. This new teaching mode has become an international mainstream in language teaching. Recently, it has appeared in China in the form of related research and review. FonF consists of reactive FonF and preemptive one. Previous research both at home and abroad addressed reactive FonF a lot, and few studies are about preemptive FonF, especially in China.The present study aims to focus on preemptive FonF episodes (FFEs) mainly because the researcher finds that preemptive FFEs consist of student-initiated ones. The descriptive study by Ellis et al (2001) suggests that the preemptive FFEs initiated by students lead to high rate of successful uptake moves and provide more opportunities for correct output, therefore facilitate language acquisition.The present study is an attempt to describe preemptive FonF episodes in senior high English classes in China. It adopts descriptive research methodology, and studies the lessons of two experienced senior high English teachers as a case.180minutes of naturally occurring, meaning-focused English lessons were observed and audio-recorded in four different classes of the same senior high school taught by the two teachers in Nanjing, Jiangsu Province, China.A total of86focus-on-form episodes (FFEs) within180minutes’ intact English classes were identified and used as a basis to illustrate the real application situation of preemptive FonF instruction in China’s senior high school.The major findings are as followings:1) An FFE occurred at the rate of every rate of2.1minutes. Among those86identified FFEs, there were more reactive FFEs than preemptive ones, taking the percentage of approximately64%and36%respectively.2) Among those31preemptive FFEs, there were almost77%teacher-initiated FFEs and23%student-initiated FFEs;3) The rate of successful uptake in student-initiated FFEs was higher than that of teacher-initiated, which was about83.3%and58.8%respectively;4) The majority of linguistic focus in preemptive FFEs was attended to vocabulary and grammar, which were35.5%and25.8%respectively. Those findings suggested that some of senior high schools in China have realized the imperfection of CLT in promoting learners’ language accuracy and have taken measures to improve the situation, e.g, FonF instruction. Preemptive FonF instruction was applied in senior high English classes, and it had some effects on facilitating language learning in case of successful uptake move. However, some problems existed in practice, for example the linguistic focus was inclined mainly to vocabulary and grammar.