Investigating English Grammatical Awareness Of Junior Secondary School Students

Based on the integrated definitions of language awareness,this research defines grammatical awareness from an integrated perspective as language learners'inclination to consciously notice and process grammatical forms and mistakes within language input and output referring to grammatical knowledge.Hence,grammatical awareness is a comprehensive concept including grammatical knowledge,attention allocation and cognitive processing.Based on this definition,this study investigated seventy Chinese eight-grade junior high school students' English grammatical awareness,aiming to find out the internal structure and working mechanism of grammatical awareness,namely whether the three components contribute to the development of grammatical awareness to the same degree and whether the three interact with one another.It employed three language tasks(English reading comprehension.writing and revising)to elicit participants' comprehension and production of meaning and used two post-task questionnaires and semi-structured interview to explore their attention allocation,grammatical knowledge and cognitive processing.By statistic analysis oft the quantitative data and coding of the qualitative data,it was found that during Ooutput tasks cognitive processing made the most contribution to grammatical awareness while in the input tasks the three components made nearly equal contribution.And the three components were significantly correlated with one another in various patterns resulting from learners' individual perception of grammatical accuracy.Hence,task type and learners' individual differences affected the internal structure and working mechanism of grammatical awareness.This research facilitates theoretical construction of grammatical awareness and enlightens English teachers to help students enhance noticing of forms,consolidate grammatical knowledge and increase capability to interpret meaning and correct mistakes to raise their grammatical awareness.And teachers need to respect learners'individual differences and consider the feature of language tasks during the process.