A Survey Of College English Teachers' Cognition Of Grammar Instruction

Grammar and grammar teaching have always been and will continue to be an area of controversy. Against this background of'interesting times'for grammar and grammar teaching, this research presented a survey of the cognition of English teachers of non-English major undergraduates in colleges and universities. This research is based on the previous research of teachers'cognition. To be more specific, this study focused on the following three aspects. One was the teacher's cognition of the role of grammar in language and grammar teaching in language teaching. One was about the teacher's attitudes toward grammar teaching approaches and methods. And one was about the teacher's attitudes towards the applications of these approaches and methods.To answer these three questions, a survey was conducted with the participation of fifty-six English teachers to non-English major undergraduates from four colleges and universities in Wuhan. This research employed the questionnaire adapted from Burgess and Etherington as the instrument in data collection. And responses from the participant teachers were mainly quantitative. According to the data analysis, the following major findings could be generated:First of all, most teachers agreed that grammar is the building blocks of language which are combined to form a whole system while they didn't agree that grammar is just a refinement of language. From the result, we can conclude that grammar is really important in language and thus grammar teaching is necessary for language teaching.Secondly, following their experiences of classroom teaching practice, the majority of the teachers saw explicit grammar teaching as something essential while implicit grammar teaching as something complement to explicit grammar teaching. Though we admit that the ultimate goal of language teaching and learning is communication, explicit grammar teaching was seen as part of language teaching, for grammatical competence is also seen as one component of communicative competence.Thirdly, as anything could happen in real classroom teaching, teachers'attitudes and behavior are actually affected by students'characteristics and needs.The findings of the present study have some implications for L2 grammar teaching. As grammar is really important in language and grammar teaching in language teaching, the teacher should do something to teach grammar well. And explicit grammar teaching complemented by implicit grammar teaching should be employed in teaching grammar. On the whole, meaning-based and task-based methods were popular among the teachers. However, this study had some limitations that data was not that reliable for there were too many statements in the questionnaire and that the teachers might have not seriously thought about the statements. Therefore, further research is needed.