A Tentative Study To Implement Reflective Grammar Teaching Into College English Teaching

Reflective teaching rose in the early 1980s and quickly developed into an important trend in some western countries. However, it has not been given much attention in China until a decade ago that an increasing population of Chinese scholars and researchers began to elaborate the benefits of it and to conduct some empirical research on it. Reflective teaching means teachers, by engaging themselves in action research, explore the strategies they use in the teaching process and reflect on the accompanying results of their teaching practice, which can result in effective teaching and the teacher's self-development.College English grammar teaching in China has not been paid enough attention to. Teachers and researchers have found that college students'writing and speaking skills are poor partly owing to lack of adequate grammatical awareness and knowledge. The purpose of this empirical research is to explore whether the teacher's reflective grammar teaching can have a positive influence on students grammar competence, especially on grammar accuracy and syntactic complexity.The research lasted about sixteen weeks with 37 students majoring in international trade from Hunan Institute of Science and Technology as the subjects. The data were collected and recorded using various means, mainly comprising of students'writing samples, teacher journals,questionnaires and student interviews. The results of the research were analyzed by means of students'writing samples and three questionnaires of the participants. The outcome from the analysis of writing samples and questionnaires shows there is a highly related relationship between reflective grammar teaching and students'grammar accuracy, but a medium relationship between reflective grammar teaching and syntactic complexity. By comparing different variables in student writing samples in three tasks, students made significant improvement in grammar accuracy, but minor improvement in syntactic complexity. And the descriptive statistics obtained from questionnaire investigations on students'perception of reflective grammar teaching and their grammar learning belief indicated that they hold a positive attitude toward reflective grammar teaching and it also has the potential to boost motivation for and interest in grammar learning among students. Therefore, reflective grammar teaching can be applied to college English teaching.The present study may shed light on research of similar kinds and serve as reference to college English teachers and students. But due to time and condition limited, the findings are limited and some aspects are ignored. Research of larger scale on these aspects is expected.