The Study On The Application Of Focus-on-form In College English Classroom

As language meaning and form are inseparable and supplement in language teaching and learning, it is of great significance to integrate them into the real language teaching. However, with the rapid development of the economy, more elites with ability of communication in English are needed in our country, which leads to the questioning of the traditional form-focused teaching instruction and the popularity of the meaning-focused teaching instruction. As a result of the change in teaching instruction, both teachers and students focus mainly on meaning and communicative skills, but linguistic forms like grammar, vocabulary and pronunciation are relatively overlooked. Therefore, it comes the question of how to balance form and meaning or communication teaching in English classroom, and the focus-on-form(Fon F) instruction put forward by Long(1991) and Long and Robinson(1998) helps to incorporate the two into classroom teaching. It refers to the instruction that in a meaning-focused or communicative classroom, students’ attention is drawn to linguistic forms incidentally so as to guarantee the processing of the communicative activities.The thesis based on the theories related to focus-on-form of Long(1991) and Ellis(2001, 2002) and relative researches at home and abroad, aims to study the application of Fon F in Chinese college English teaching. In detail, the study is carried out through answering following three questions: what is the current situation of the application of Fon F in Chinese college English classroom? What are the linguistic forms that teachers and students need to pay attention to? What are the options and techniques that the teachers use in response to students’ linguistic form errors or form knowledge loss and what is their effectiveness? Through finding out the answers, problems, solutions or advice are given by the author about the application of Fon F.The study was carried out through separate but corresponding teachers’ and students’ questionnaires to investigate their perceptions of linguistic forms and a 20-hour classroom observation of the application of Fon F. Through the analysis of questionnaires, it is found that although teachers and students have many similar perceptions about linguistic form, there are still some disagreements, especially on students’ ability to learn forms independently through listening or speaking activities and students’ improvement of accuracy and fluency. All these disagreements might lead to students’ negative act or learning in English study. Results of classroom observation reveal that linguistic forms are given little attention to, especially linguistic forms that students use wrong or improperly in their communicative activities. The linguistic forms that teachers pay most attention to in Fon F episodes(FFEs) are grammar and vocabulary, while among all the linguistic form errors observed, pronunciation occupies the most, which shows the discrepancy between teachers’ focus and students’ practical weakness. It is easy for the teachers to neglect pronunciation errors for they know the topic and have no difficulty in understanding students’ ideas. Although more teachers and students prefer implicit Fon F and leading students to self-correction in questionnaires, the classroom observation shows that teachers are more likely to use explicit Fon F rather than implicit Fon F. The most used technique is explicit feedback which accounts nearly a half, and the time consuming techniques like recast, repetition or elicitation are less frequently used. Considering the student-centered learning method and the smaller number of student-initiated FFEs observed, more encouragement should be given to the students to ask about the linguistic forms that they feel uncertain. The results from classroom observation show that students get uptake or self-correction when their wrongly or improperly used linguistic forms are given feedback by the teachers, which indicates that Fon F options and techniques are effective in raising students’ awareness and uptake of their wrong or improper use of linguistic forms. But as the small sample of all the options and techniques observed, it is hard to conclude that all the options and techniques are effective in all classroom contexts. In brief, the thesis provides an example for the study of college English teaching, and has practical meaning for college English teaching and curriculum design.