An Investigation Into The Current Situation Of English Grammar Teaching In A Chinese Vocational School

Grammar and grammar teaching has been and continues to be an area of controversy in the field of Second Language Acquisition. Although linguists and teachers have been studying grammar teaching and learning for centuries, the efficiency of grammar teaching and learning remains to be low. At present, most English teachers and students do not know how to teach and learn English grammar in effective ways, and they do not know how to deal with the difficulties they encounter in grammar teaching and learning. Therefore, it is necessary and urgent to examine the problems and difficulties that teachers and students have in classroom, and then give some suggestions to change the current situation in grammar teaching and learning.The study tries to investigate the current situation of grammar and grammar teaching in a Chinese Vocational School. The investigation is based on the previous researches of grammar and grammar teaching. Specifically, this investigation explored the following three questions:(1) What are teachers’ and students’ beliefs towards grammar and grammar teaching?(2) What are teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards explicit grammar teaching approaches and implicit grammar teaching approaches?(3) What difficulties do teachers and students have during their process of grammar teaching and learning? In order to answer these three questions, I invited 120 non-English major students and 40 English teachers from a Vocational College to participate in this study. This investigation employed two questionnaires and a follow-up interview as the instruments in data collection, and the data were analyzed by using SPSS 13.0.This study has revealed the following major findings: First, both teachers and students are aware of the importance of grammar and grammar teaching in second language acquisition. Grammar is the framework of language and grammar teaching is an indispensable part of English teaching. Besides, most of them hold positive attitudes towards grammar and grammar teaching. Secondly, there are some differences in teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards the application of explicit and implicit approaches. Thirdly, both teachers and students have their own difficulties in grammar teaching and grammar learning. For teachers, they found it was difficult to correct students’ errors of grammar. For students, they found it was hard to usegrammar in authentic texts.The findings of this investigation have some implications for grammar and grammar teaching in Chinese EFL context. First of all, since grammar is really important in English teaching and learning, teachers should try their best to teacher grammatical knowledge and grammatical rules. Secondly, both explicit and implicit grammar teaching approaches should be employed in foreign language teaching. The method of grammar teaching should be changed from traditional grammar teaching approaches into communication-oriented methods. Finally, all the teachers and students need to make their efforts to overcome the difficulties they have during their process of grammar teaching and grammar learning.