Application Of Functional Grammar To The Teaching Of English Subjunctive Mood At College

English grammar teaching is an essential part of English teaching and always goes throughout English teaching. For foreign language learners, grammar is the important foundation of communication in activities. However in the process of grammar teaching,traditional grammar teaching method emphasizes too much on grammar as a rule but ignores ideographic function of the grammar itself. And functional grammar treats grammar from the perspective of application. The aim of functional grammar teaching method is to make students more aware of the function of grammar and be able to better interpret the practical function of language and at the same time combine the grammar knowledge with English skills. This study applies Halliday’s functional grammar theory with a combination of Long’s Focus on Form teaching model into grammar teaching of college English major with a shift of teaching point turning from teaching grammar knowledge to developing students’ ability of using language. It intends to prove that the application of the functional grammar into grammar teaching can improve students’ enthusiasm to learn grammar, consolidate their mastery of grammar knowledge and finally foster their grammatical competence and communicative competence, which has positive significance for exploring a new grammar teaching method. Because the applications of functional grammar to grammar teaching in the teaching cases are few, this study aims to explore and solve the following three research questions:1. Is the functional grammar teaching method applicable to English grammar teaching?2. If applicable, compared with the traditional grammar teaching method, is functional grammar teaching method more effective?3. Compared with the traditional grammar teaching method, is the functional grammar teaching method more effective to arouse the students’ interest in learning grammar and promote students’ learning motivation?In this study the subjects were 47 sophomore students from English majors, Inner Mongolia University of Technology. Two parallel classes from four were chosen. One class was control class(CC) with 23 students and the other one was experimental class(EC)with 24 students. The two classes were taught by the same grammar teacher. The experimental class accepts functional grammar teaching, and the control class accepts traditional grammar teaching. This experiment adopted the quantitative tool of pre- and post-test and the questionnaire and qualitative tool of observation and interview to collect data, and used the SPSS16.0 to analyze the data. The results of analysis are as follows:1. Through the comparison of the scores of the pre-tests and post-tests of EC, the improvement of students’ scores of EC illustrates that functional grammar teaching method is applicable to college English grammar teaching.2. The functional grammar teaching method is more effective than the traditional teaching method especially in terms of writing and translation through comparing the scores of post-tests between the two classes.3. The analysis and result of questionnaires reveals that compared with the traditional teaching method, the functional teaching method is more effective to arouse students’ interest and stimulate students’ motivation.