Effects Of Timing Of Form-focused Instruction On Middle School Students' English Passive Voice Acquisition

English passive voice is a difficult grammar point for second language and foreign language learners.When learning English passive voice,learners need to learn its grammatical form,meaning,and usage.However,focus on forms and meaning-focused instruction cannot make learners acquire the three aspects effectively in the context of English learning as a foreign language.Form-focused instruction is an approach that guides learners to pay attention to language forms in meaning-based teaching.It is a coordination of focus on forms and meaning-focused instruction.Second language researchers have reached a consensus that form-focused instruction can help learners acquire the second language better.At present,researchers have proposed that the timing of form-focused instruction is an important factor affecting the language acquisition.This study investigates the effects of form-focused instruction and its different timing on the acquisition of English passive voice of Chinese learners.That is,it compares the effects of isolated and integrated form-focused instruction.In isolated form-focused instruction,attention to form is separated from meaning-based activity,which happens before or after meaning-based activity.In integrated form-focused instruction,attention to form is embedded in the meaning-based activity.In this study,both isolated and integrated form-focused instructions are preemptive,planned and generated by the teacher.In this study,form-focused instruction is centered on reading as the meaning-based context and explicit rule explanation is as the instruction of attention to form.The study is based on empirical research.The teaching experiment was carried out in No.45 Middle School of Lanzhou City,which lasted one month.120 junior high school students from Grade Three participated in the study and they were from four intact classes.EC1 accepted isolated form-focused instruction,attention to form before meaning-based activity.EC2 received isolated form-focused instruction,attention to form after meaning-based activity.EC3 accepted integrated form-focused instruction,attention to form during meaning-based activity.CC received meaning-focused instruction.After the experiment,the acquisition was measured via a test including three types of questions respectively corresponding to the form,meaning and use of English passive voice.The results show that form-focused instruction is more effective for learners' acquisition of English passive voice.There is no significant difference among form-focused instruction at different timing.However,the class taught by isolated form-focused instruction,especially attention to form before meaning-based activity,has better achievement on form acquisition of passive voice.And the class accepting integrated form-focused instruction has better achievement on use acquisition of passive voice.Therefore,the findings suggest that form-focused instruction at different timing is not in competition with each other.They are complementary to each other.Teachers can combine different timing of form-focusedinstruction to make learners acquire different aspects of a grammar point comprehensively.However,there are some limitations in this study: the short experimental time,the small quantity of subjects,only English passive voice studied and only explicit rule explanation used for focusing on form in form-focused instruction.