A Study Of The Application Of The Focus-on-Form Instruction To Teaching English Comparatives In Junior High Schools

Grammar teaching has always been an important part of English teaching.Many studies show that the Focus-on-Forms Instruction(the FonFs Instruction,in short)and the Focus-on-Meaning Instruction(the FonM Instruction,in short)have their great limitations,and the integration of traditional grammar teaching and communicative teaching methods will give full play to their respective strengths.On this basis,Long(1991)proposes a type of instruction that takes into account both meaning and form: the Focus-on-Form Instruction(the FonF Instruction,in short).Since the birth of the FonF Instruction,many researchers at home and abroad have conducted in-depth studies on the FonF Instruction from different aspects.However,there are few studies on the application of the FonF Instruction in English grammar teaching.Because English comparatives are very complex,which are quite different from those in Chinese and difficult to acquire,this study uses the Interaction Hypothesis and the Noticing Hypothesis as the theoretical bases to explore the influence of the application of the FonF Instruction on junior high school students' comprehension and production competences of English comparatives.This study addresses the following two questions:1)What are the effects of the FonF Instruction on junior high schoolstudents' comprehension competence of English comparatives?2)What are the effects of the FonF Instruction on junior high school students' production competence of English comparatives?The subjects are 90 students from two intact classes in Grade Eight from a junior high school in Fujian Province.One class is the experimental class,and the other is the controlled class.This study uses two test methods: pretest and post-test.The experiment lasts six weeks and English comparatives are chosen as the target grammar forms.The specific teaching content of the grammar items refers to the content of the textbook and the “English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education”(Ministry of Education 2017).The results of this study are as follows:1)The FonF Instruction can enhance the junior high school students' comprehension competence of English comparatives,students can better understand and master English comparatives.And its effects are better than those of the FonFs Instruction.2)The FonF Instruction can improve the junior high school students' production competence of English comparatives,and students can produce English comparatives more accurately and properly.And its effects are better than those of the FonFs Instruction.In addition,the improvement of students' production competence is more significant than that of their comprehension competence.The study shows that the FonF Instruction is helpful to improve junior high school students' acquisition of English comparatives,and it is effective to apply the FonF Instruction to English grammar teaching in junior high schools.In the process of teaching,teachers should pay attention to the combination of language form and meaning,design suitable learning tasks for learners,and apply the FonF Instruction appropriately to help students improve their comprehension and production competences of English.In view of the limitations of time and sample size,the future research can expand the sample size,and increase the research methods such as questionnaires to further confirm the validity and applicability of the study.