A Study On The Effects Of Planned Fon F Instruction On Junior High School Students'Writing Ability

For a long time,teachers and researchers have made a lot of attempts about this but the writing teaching effects are still not that ideal.The focus of writing teaching changes from practicing some grammar exercises to the communicative interaction of students and has generally experienced an evolution process of Product Approach,Process Approach and Task-based Language Teaching.Despite this,there are still many vocabulary and grammatical errors in the students' writing language;even if there are few errors,the language is still not authentic enough.Meanwhile,the theoretical and experimental studies on FonF Instruction in vocabulary and grammar field show that the combination of form and meaning can effectively promote the development of learners' second language acquisition and inter-language system and its teaching effects have been widely acknowledged(Norris & Ortega,2000).Ellis,Basturkmen and Loewen(2002)distinguish two types of FonF: Planned FonF and Incidental FonF.This study aims to explore the effects of Planned FonF Instruction on junior high school students' English writing ability.Based on the three theoretical bases(including interaction hypothesis,noticing hypothesis and output hypothesis),this paper carried out an experiment to study the following three questions:(1)What are the effects of Planned FonF Instruction on the complexity of junior high school students' English writing?(2)What are the effects of Planned FonF Instruction on the accuracy of junior high school students' English writing?(3)What are the effects of Planned FonF Instruction on the fluency of junior high school students' English writing?The experiment was conducted in two classes of grade 9 in a junior high school of Changsha.The two classes were respectively studied as experimental class and controlled class.The experiment lasted for 12 weeks.The experimental class adopted Planned FonF Instruction and the controlled class adopted traditional Product Approach for teaching writing.There was a pretest before the experiment to ensure that the two classes had a similar writing level.After the teaching experiment,a post-test was performed to compare the teaching effects of the two instructions.The results show that:(1)Planned FonF Instruction can significantly improve the syntactic complexity of junior high school students‘ English writing,but the effects on lexical complexity is not so obvious.(2)Planned FonF Instruction can improve the accuracy of students‘ English writing.(3)Planned FonF Instruction can improve the fluency of students‘ English writing.It can be seen that the application of Planned FonF Instruction can improve the English writing ability of junior high school students,which provides a new teaching model and choice for junior high school English teachers.In view of the limitations of experimental conditions,the study has some shortcomings,such as single research method and small number of experimental sample.Therefore,the long-term effects of this instruction need to be further tested.Future researches are supposed to add questionnaires or to be combined with some qualitative research methods,such as interviews,in order to be more comprehensive and get to know more about students' opinions on Planned FonF Instruction,so as to continuously improve teaching effects.What‘s more,expanding the experimental sample and extending the research time can make the research findings more convincing and more applicable.