The Application Of Concept-based Approach To English Grammar Teaching In Junior High School

As an important language knowledge,grammar plays a crucial role in language learning.English grammar teaching is very significant in foreign language learning.How to effectively improve the English grammar level of learners,especially for junior high school students is extremely urgent.According to the previous teaching researches,grammar teaching generally experienced some periods: traditional grammar-translation period,structuralism period,behaviorism period and cognitivism period.Moreover,the emphasis on grammar teaching varies from one period to another.For English grammar teaching in junior high school,teachers generally adopt the method of telling grammatical rules,presenting relevant examples and making drills.Although students memorize a lot of grammar rules,they are still unclear about the concept and meaning of grammar.Therefore,in grammar learning,they often make inertia mistake in the wrong choices of tense and the mix of polysemous prepositions,which is due to the lack of conceptual knowledge.Hence,on the basis of summarizing the previous researches,the author finds that there is less concern on the conceptual level of the grammatical concepts based on conceptual metaphor and image schema.This thesis tries to apply Concept-based Approach to English grammar teaching in junior high school,in order to promote students' deep learning of English grammar concept and meaning,thus gaining a deeper understanding of grammar knowledge.Based on sociocultural theory,conceptual metaphor theory and image schema theory,Concept-based Approach generally has five basic steps in specific teaching:explanation,materialization,communicative activities,verbalization and internalization.This thesis tries to explore the following two questions:(1)Can Concept-based Approach effectively improve students' grammar scores in junior high school?(2)What are the students' attitudes to the application of Concept-based Approach in teaching grammar?The 80 participants in the experiment were selected from two parallel classes in grade nine from NO.4 junior high school of Min County,Gansu province for an eight-week experiment.Class Five(40)was randomly chosen as the experimental class which was under Concept-based Approach and Class Six(40)was the control class which was under traditional teaching method.All the other conditions including textbook,teacher,and the length of class time were equal.There were three tools in experiment: grammar test paper,questionnaire and interview.Among them,the grammar test paper was applied to the experimentbefore and after the experiment,and the changes of students' grammar performance were analyzed by SPSS22.0.Interviews and questionnaire were used to comprehend the attitudes of students to the application of Concept-based Approach to grammar learning.The results are as follows:(1)The performance of the experimental class is significantly improved than the control class,so Concept-based Approach can effectively improve the English grammar scores of junior high school students.(2)Students generally give a positive feedback to the Concept-based Approach and help them to understand the concept and meaning of grammar in a more visual way.The results show that Concept-based Approach is more effective to the English grammar of junior high school students than the traditional 3P teaching method.Through the use of image schema and conceptual metaphor,scientific language is taught as the starting point of teaching,so that students can grasp the scientific concept to guide their language practice.This approach can not only enhance students' interest in English grammar,but also help students improve their grammar performance,which is an effective grammar teaching method.This thesis hopes to improve students' grammar level with the help of Concept-based Approach,so that more researches can be carried out to prove whether these findings can be extended to other junior high schools in grammar teaching.However,there are some limitations in the implementation of this teaching model,which still needs to be adjusted and improved in combination with the practice of teaching.