Application Of Focus On Form To English Grammar Teaching In Senior High School

English grammar penetrates all aspects of English learning and occupies a decisive position in improving the comprehensive competence of language use for English learners.How to carry out grammar teaching effectively has attracted the attention of scholars both at home and abroad.Traditional grammar teaching stresses teachers' explanations of grammar rules and students' mechanical practices,and it overemphasizes the grammatical forms and neglects the practical application.Long(1990)proposes the focus on form,which is regarded as a new teaching method has received much attention and focus on shifting students' attention properly and timely to grammatical forms in meaningful interactions.In recent years,focus on form has become one of the hot issues in the field of second language acquisition both at home and abroad.At present,there are more theoretical but less empirical studies on the focus on form,and lots of empirical studies mostly concentrated on the effects of focus on form on the participants' achievement on test for English grammatical knowledge and the change of emotional attitude in junior middle school.Therefore,based on previous studies and the noticing hypothesis,interaction hypothesis and input process model as theoretical framework,the present study chose 106 students from two parallel classes in Grade 1 of No.1 Middle School in Zhenyuan County,Gansu Province as subjects and takes English relative clauses as the target language form and is designed to explore the effects of focus on form on senior high school students' acquisition of the English relative clauses.This thesis aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the effects of focus on form on learning English relative clauses?(2)What are the effects of focus on form on three different error types when learning English relative clauses?(3)What are the changes of students' attitudes towards English learning after the application of focus on form?In order to solve the above three research questions,this study conducted a two-month teaching experiment.In the teaching process,experimental class uses the teaching methodfocus on form and the other class uses PPP teaching model.In order to examine learners' acquisition of target grammar,an experimental design with pre-test,post-test and questionnaire was adopted.The results show that focus on form can promote learners' acquisition of relative clauses more effectively than traditional grammar teaching.Focus on form can correct the three common errors of students in the acquisition of relative clauses more effectively.Students' attitudes towards grammar learning have been changed,and their interest in learning has also been enhanced.Thus,focus on form can be applied in developing grammatical knowledge for senior high school students.