A Study On The Application Of Focus-on-form To Senior High School English Writing Teaching

Writing has always been a relative weakness in English teaching and a difficult problem disturbing English teachers and students.In order to stimulate senior high school students' interest in English writing,improve their writing proficiency,and cultivate their ability of meeting communicative needs in writing,task-based language teaching is increasingly being advocated.However,it is often likely to ignore theimportance of language form in communicative classrooms.As a consequence,there are still problems in vocabulary,grammar and other language forms in English writing in senior high school.In recent 30 years,focus on form(FonF)is a hot spot in the studies of second language acquisition and teaching at home and abroad.Theoretical and practical studies indicate that the integration of FonF instruction into communicative classroom can effectively promote learners' second language acquisition and their interlanguage development.Based on relevant domestic and foreign theories,this thesis adopts experimental method to explore the effectiveness of applying FonF to English writing teaching in senior high school and answer the following three research questions:1.What types of FonF appear in English writing teaching in senior high school?What forms do they focus on?2.To what extent can FonF improve students' English writing proficiency,especially accuracy and complexity?3.To what extent can FonF enhance students' attention to linguistic forms in writing?The research subjects selected in this study are two first-grade parallel classes from a senior high school in Nanjing.One class acts as the experiment group(EG)receiving FonF instruction and the other as the control group(CG)receiving no FonF instruction,both taught by the author.Writing lessons are carried out once in two weeks and the whole experimental teaching lasts for three months.The instruments in the present study consist of pre-test,mid-test,post-test and questionnaire.And the experimental data is analyzed by SPSS PASW Statistics 18.0.0.The major findings are as follows:1.There are four kinds of FonF appeared in the classroom:planned FonF,teacher-initiated preemptive FonF,learner-initiated preemptive FonF,reactive FonF.Students focus their most attention on vocabulary,successively followed by grammar,discourse and pronunciation.2.There are higher writing scores,higher syntactic complexity and less linguistic errors in the compositions of EG than those of CG in post-test.3.Students of EG pay more attention to linguistic forms and hold more positive attitude towards English writing.The present study proves the effectiveness of FonF in improving senior high school students' English writing proficiency to some degree.The author hopes that the findings of this study can provide inspiration for related domestic researches and classroom teaching practice.