An Experimental Study On Effects Of Focus On Form And Focus On Forms On Junior Students' English Multidimensional Vocabulary Knowledge Acquisition

Vocabulary is the core of English learning.But most junior students can not acquire words efficiently.Besides,vocabulary teaching in junior schools emphasizes acquisition of word's spelling and meaning while it pays little attention to acquisition of other dimensions,like practical use,grammatical function.The study is an experimental study which investigates different effects of two instructional approaches-focus on form?FonF?and focus on forms?FonFs?on acquisition of five-dimensional vocabulary by junior students and it aims to answer the following two research questions:?1?Do FonF instrucction and FonFs instruction have effects on junior students'vocabulary acquisition respectively?If both instructions take effect,are there significantly different effects existing between two instructions on vocabulary acquisition??2?Are there any differences in the effects of five-dimensional vocabulary acquisition between FonF instruction and FonFs instruction?If there are,which dimensions can acquire significantly different effects between two instructions?70 participants from two classes in a Guangzhou middle school were selected as participants and two classes were randomly chosen as EC and CC.FonF instruction was applied in EC and FonFs instruction was applied in CC.Participants learned target words by reading a text which contains target words and by finishing a reading task in EC while they learned words under PPP teaching model in CC.Specifically,the teacher first presents target words to learners.Then,learners finish predetermined lexical exercises and finally produce target words by making sentences.The multi-dimensional vocabulary test was required to finish immediately after the teaching and a delayed post-test was conducted one week later.The study lasted three weeks from Oct 5^thh to 25^th.The results show that both FonF and FonFs instruction exert an influence on vocabulary learning and FonFs instruction performs significantly better than FonF instruction both in the post-test and delayed post-test in general.When it comes to acquisition of five dimensions of vocabulary,FonFs instruction has advantage in acquisition of four dimensions that are Meaning,Grammatical function,Orthography,Collocation respectively.However,only two dimensions-grammatical function and orthography are acquired significantly better under FonFs instruction.As for the dimension of pragmatic usage,the effect of FonF instruction is significant superior to FonFs instruction.It can be seen that teaching effects of FonFs instruction should not be dismissed in vocabulary teaching.Besides,more attention is advocated to pay to the master of multidimensional vocabulary knowledge in vocabulary learning.