The Effect Of Focus-on-form Instruction On Senior High School Students’ Acquisition Of English Present Participle

Grammar, the basic guarantee of communicating properly with others in English, has played a very important role in English learning and teaching for a long time. However, the present English grammar teaching is not satisfactory, and there are a lot of problems exist in practical teaching. The traditional grammar teaching method is utilized to teach English as isolated units by majority of teachers, but unfortunately, the method is always pretty boring and even makes learners lose interests in language learning. Therefore, the traditional teaching method not only inhibits students’ enthusiasm and initiative in learning English grammar, but also weights against the enhancement of ability for students to use language.This thesis aims to explore a more effective grammar teaching method in order to improve the Presentation-practice-production(3P) teaching method which centers on explanations and make students have confidence and interests in learning grammar again. Under the framework of Focus on form teaching method, teachers introduce the target grammar by a meaningful context to let students notice the language points incidentally and encourage them to express freely. In the stage of presentation, teacher and classmates give speaker implicit feedback. In this way, students can learn and use grammar in a positive atmosphere. The author compares the teaching effect between Focus on form teaching method and 3P teaching method in the experiment, and attempts to solve three research questions: first, is Focus on form Instruction more effective than traditional 3P teaching method in productive skill of present participle? Second, is Focus on form Instruction more effective than traditional 3P teaching method in receptive skill of present participle? Third, does the students in Experimental Class(EC) like the Focus on form Instruction compared with their teachers’ previous teaching method?In order to check the effect of Focus on form teaching method, this study mainly adopted questionnaires and test papers. Students of two parallel classes in senior high school Grade one were chosen as subjects for eight weeks. The target grammar in the experiment was present participle as the attribute, predicative, object complement and adverbial. Students in Experimental Class(EC) received Focus on form teaching method, while Controlled Class(CC) was taught by traditional 3P teaching method. All the collected data were processed and analyzed by SPSS17.0. The results of data analysis showed that compared with 3P teaching method, Focus on form teaching method was more popular among students, not only improved students’ interests in learning English grammar but also improved their productive skill and receptive skill in learning present participle. However, their receptive skill in general English knowledge learnt during the treatment didn’t have too much difference. This study will be a positive guide to the grammar teaching in the future and the application of Focus on form teaching method, which can not only improve students’ ability to do exercises but also help them to use English in daily life accurately and quickly.