A Comparative Study of Two Teaching Methodologies for English Tense Acquisition Among First-Year Junior High School Students

Abstract

This study examined the effects of two instructional approaches on junior high school students’ acquisition of English tense structures, including the simple present, simple past, and present progressive. Specifically, it compared the effectiveness of form-focused instruction (FFI) with the integration of form-focused instruction and communicative language teaching (FFI+CLT). Participants were 68 seventh-grade students from a private junior high school in northern Taiwan. A six-week quasi-experimental design was employed. Students’ grammatical competence was assessed using a grammaticality completion test and a sentence tense transformation test, and the data were analyzed with SPSS 31.0. The results indicated that students receiving FFI+CLT significantly outperformed those receiving FFI alone on both assessments, demonstrating greater gains in grammatical knowledge and controlled written production of English tense structures. These findings suggest that integrating attention to linguistic form with meaningful communication enhances learners’ grammatical development more effectively than form-focused instruction alone. The study supports the pedagogical value of combining FFI and CLT in English grammar instruction and provides implications for English language teaching and future research.