Pedagogical Intervention Strategies Used By English Teachers To Draw Students' Attention To Form

Form-focused instruction(FFI)has gained widespread acceptance as an effective approach in drawing learners' attention to linguistic forms.It is founded on the notion that drawing learners' attentional mechanisms to linguistic features in the input promotes noticing and intake.A lot of studies have been conducted to investigate the positive role of intervention on form.Therefore,it is worthwhile to investigate the FFI interventions in various contexts with different learners.An observation scheme,developed by Simard and Jean(2011)called Intervention-on-Form(s)-Observation Scheme(IFOS),was used to collect data.The database was drawn from transcripts of audio-recordings of 31 English lessons in English demonstration teaching class in junior high school.All the classes have been transcribed and coded according to it.Consequently,the intervention types(intervention-on-form techniques,form oriented exercises,textual grammar exercises)and its related characteristics,such as types of focus,interactional pattern,initiator,were identified to find out the frequency and the allocated time of all pedagogical interventions used by English teachers.The present study was set out to explore the form-focused instruction interventions used by foreign language teachers to draw their students' attention to form in English demonstration teaching class.Accordingly,the following three research questions are addressed:(1)what is the frequency of English teachers' pedagogical interventions aiming at drawing language learners' attention to form?(2)What types of FFI intervention do the teachers use to draw learners' attention to form?(3)What are the characteristics of each FFI intervention? The major findings of the present study are as follows:By observing and analyzing the teaching process of teachers' use of pedagogical intervention strategies to guide students to pay attention to language forms,the following conclusions are as follows: 1)The results indicated that teachers in English demonstration teaching class frequently use pedagogical intervention strategies to draw students' attention to form;2)Teachers did not use a very wide array of means,they preferred intervention-on-form techniques type than other two types of FFI intervention;3)most of the intervention initiators are teachers;4)In terms of the characteristics of the intervention,results revealed that the main focus of the intervention was on inflectional morphology,;5)almost all the language used during the pedagogical intervention was English,Chinese is rarely used in class;6)In addition,the result also demonstrated that one-on-one interactional pattern occurred more frequently than whole class and small group pattern.More incidental FFI interventions occurred than planned FFI intervention in the English demonstration teaching.Based on the results of the present study,Investigating FFI intervention in different teaching contexts could be informative in second language acquisition.It also gives some implication for English teachers,such as teachers should use more types of pedagogical intervention to draw students' attention to form.