Empiric Analysis On The Effectiveness Of Task-based English Grammar Teaching

The purpose of this thesis is to testify task-based teaching approach is more effective than the traditional PPP(Presentation,Practice and Production)method in grammar teaching in vocational schools.An experimental study is carried out in this thesis.Two natural senior classes(58 students)from a university took part in the experiment.All of these 58 students experienced the following:pre-test,ten-week teaching activities,post-test.The data of this experiment was collected through testing, and SPSS 12.0 software was used to analyze the data.Based on the results of the pre-test,20 intermediate-level students were chosen from one class as the subjects of Experimental Group(EG),and the task-based language teaching was used in the ten-week teaching activities.From the other class,20 intermediate-level students were also selected as the subjects of Controlled Group(CG)which received the traditional PPP teaching method.The whole teaching activity lasted for ten weeks.The teaching contents contained six important grammar points:tense,subjunctive mood, subject-verb concord,infinite verbs,attributive clause and modal verbs.To testify whether the Experimental Group and the Control Group differed significantly before the experiment,an independent samples t-test was employed to compare the pre-test scores of the Experimental Group and those of the Control Group.The results indicated that the mean scores of the EG and CG were 12.10 and 12.00 respectively,the mean difference was only.100,and P(2-tailed)=.852>.05, which meant that the CG and the EG were not significantly different in their levels of grammar competence.In order to know whether the pre-test and the post-test were at the same difficulty level,10 students with the similar English level selected from one class were asked to do the pre-test and the post-test at the same time and under the same environment.A paired-sample t-test was used to analyze the data of these 10 students' scores.The results of the analysis showed that P=.502>.05 which meant that there was no significant difference in difficulty between the pre-test paper and the post-test paper.After ten-week teaching activities,both the EG and the CG took the post-test. Independent samples t-test was used to test the scores of the EG and the CG.The results of the statistical analysis showed that P(2-tailed)=.020<.05,which meant that the scores of the two groups were different significantly.And the mean scores of the EG and the CG were 13.75 and 12.45 respectively,with the score of the EG 1.30 points higher than that of the CG.Compared with the results of the pre-test,we can see that after ten-weeks teaching activities both the EG and the CG had made progress but the EG performed better than the CG in the grammar test although they were almost at the same level before the 10 weeks' activities.From the analysis it is easy to get the conclusion that the task-based teaching approach used appropriately in the EG classroom is helpful in developing students' grammatical abilities.And it is more effective than the traditional PPP method in grammar teaching in vocational schools,and it is significant to apply task-based approach in grammar teaching in vocational schools.