A Comparison of the Effectiveness of Focus-on-form and Meaning-focused Instructions in the English Classroom

比較「形式為中心」與「意義為中心」英語教學法於國中生英語課堂的文法教學成效之研究

莊媖纓(Ying-Ying Chuang)

《稻江學報》 4卷2期 (2010/03) Pp. 89-102

https://doi.org/10.7018/JTU.201003.0089

摘要

「形式為中心」教學法是一種在最近幾年受到注意的新形態外語教學模式，它得到許多教師及研究學者的重視並推崇其理念。從許多國外的研究報告中，幾乎都可獲得證實：在英語課堂教學過程中及學生的學習效果中，它比起「意義為中心」教學法，更來得有效果。本研究的目的，是要就實施「形式為中心」及「意義為中心」教學法於臺灣國中一年級學生的英語課堂，尤其是在英語初學者的文法學習成效中，來比較這兩種教學法是否有達到顯著差異，及是否與國外研究報告有相似之結果。筆者將兩班學生各分配為實驗組及對照組，兩班分別施以不同教學法，在四星期的期間來教授同樣的文法單元（關係子句），最後再以初級英檢題目之閱讀測驗來評量兩組學生的學習成效。本研究所得到的結論，由兩組學生的英語閱讀評量測驗成績中，雖未達統計學上的顯著差異，但較高的平均值仍顯示「形式為中心」教學法在國中生英語課堂的文法教學上，比「意義為中心」之教學法是有更好的學習效果。

關鍵字

英語學習 ； 形式為中心教學法 ； 意義為中心教學法 ； 演繹法 ； 文法規納教學法

並列摘要

One of the rather recent topics which preoccupied the language teaching circles for a while is the Focus-on-form (FOF) instruction originally proposed by Long (1991). Many language teachers, educators, and researchers ”praised it as if it were the miracle method they had always been searching for” (Poole, 2005, p. 47) and many research projects have tried to prove it being more effective than meaning-focused (MF) instruction and some researches also attributed the effectiveness of FOF instruction to the way it is performed and the personality factors of learners and teachers. This study aimed to investigate the effectiveness of FOF and MF instruction in EFL settings especially for the beginning learners who were in a more crucial need of developing a grammatical competence in L2. Therefore, the effectiveness of FOF and MF instruction was examined to see if any significant difference existed in the effect of meaning-focused and focus-on-form activities on Taiwanese junior high school students' learning grammatical points in the English classroom. The researcher chose two classes randomly and assigned them as two groups: experimental and control groups, and the instructors used FOF instruction in the experimental group and MF instruction in the control group to teach the same grammar unit (relative clauses) for a four-week period. After that, a reading test was conducted to see if any significant difference occurred in the scores of these two groups. However, the result did not reach the statistic significance, but the greater means of the experimental group on the total and the two subsections of the test imply that FOF instruction may bring about more satisfactory results. The study implied the confirmation of previous research which has shown the effectiveness of FOF over MF instruction in grammar teaching of the Taiwanese junior high school English class.

並列關鍵字

English as a foreign language ； focus-on-form instruction ； meaning-focused activity ； explicit and implicit instructions