A Study On The Application Of Integrated And Isolated Focus On Form Instruction To English Grammar Teaching In Middle Schools

Grammar plays an essential role in English learning.For foreign language teaching,how to make grammar teaching more effective has always been the focus of some teachers and scholars’ research.Long proposed focus on form instruction in 1991,and some scholars have done a lot of theoretical and empirical research on the application of focus on form instruction to grammar teaching.At present,some scholars have studied different types of focus on form instruction through empirical research.It was further divided into integrated focus on form instruction and isolated focus on form instruction by Spada and Lightbown(2008).In order to make further study on the impacts of the two approaches on grammar teaching,this research conducted an 8-week teaching experiment,selected middle school students as experimental objects,and chose simple past tense as the target grammar.This research contains the following two questions:(1)What are the immediate effects and delayed effects between Integrated FFI and Isolated FFI on the middle school students’ simple past tense learning?(2)What are the middle school students’ attitudes toward Integrated FFI and Isolated FFI?The research consists of five parts: pre-test,teaching experiment,immediate post-test,delayed post-test,questionnaires and interview.By analyzing the statistical data,the author drawn the following conclusions:(1)Both teaching methods can greatly improve middle school students’ simple past tense level.(2)Both the immediate effects and the delayedeffects of isolated focus on form instruction are better than that of integrated focus on form instruction.(3)Middle school students are more willing to receive isolated focus on form instruction.However,this research also has its deficiencies and limitations.First,few experimental objects participated in this study.Second,the author only selected simple past tense as the target grammar.