A Study Of The Application Of Content-based Instruction In English Grammar Teaching In High School

In China,it’s a crucial period for English learning in high school.Grammar,as one of the key points as well as difficult points in English learning in high school,has always been one of the hot research spots in the field of English teaching.In the traditional English class,most of the teachers teach grammar by demonstration,i.e.explain the grammar points and their usage rules first,then assign a lot of exercises for students to practice,which overemphasizes grammar explanation and mechanical exercises.Teaching vapid grammar with relatively rigid methods undoubtedly makes the grammar class dull and depressing,and students feel grammar bitter and with poor learning motivation;as a result,the teaching is relatively inefficient.Therefore,how to teach grammar in a way that improving students’ interest and making the grammar points easier for students to understand and accept has been a research focus for plenty of foreign language scholars and teachers.Derived from the Immersion Bilingual Education experiment conducted in Montreal,Canada in 1960 s,the Content-based Instruction(CBI for short)has become a very important teaching method,which changes the phenomenon of artificially separating linguistic elements from contents in traditional foreign language teaching,intending to combine language study with content learning,i.e.teaching language based on certain subjects or some themes.This method has obtained remarkable results in foreign language teaching at abroad,thus,it draws much attention from scholars and researchers of foreign language in China.Recently,although lots of related theoretical and empirical studies on CBI have been conducted,there are few studies on CBI used in English grammar teaching in high school.Therefore,the author tries to apply CBI to grammar teaching in high school,attempting to explore whether CBI is feasible in grammar teaching in high school and its implementation effect.Based on this,the author designed an experiment around two questions:1.How does CBI affect students’ attitudes toward English grammar learning?2.What’s the effect of CBI on students’ grammar competence?To figure the questions out,the author selected,according to the English scores of entrance test,two parallel classes of grade one in a high school in Qixian as the experimental class and the control class randomly.Grammar was taught in the experimental class with CBI and the control class with the traditional--Grammar-Translation Method.The study began in September,2018 and ended in December,2018,lasting four months.Qualitative and quantitative research methods were adopted in the experiment.To ensure the validity of the experiment,a pre-test was designed to know about the present grammar levels of the two classes,to get to know whether it is feasible to conduct the experiment in the two classes;a post-test was conducted to testify whether there is obvious difference of grammar scores between the two classes after 4 months’ learning with different teaching method;a pre-questionnaire was carried out to investigate students’ attitudes toward grammar learning and different grammar teaching methods,and whether there is significant difference between that of the two classes;a post-questionnaire were meant to collect information on students’ attitudes and thoughts on CBI in the experimental class.What’s more,the author also designed interviews to certain students to collect information as supplement to questionnaires and tests.Statistics analysis of the results was processed by SPSS software.The final research results demonstrate that it is effective to apply CBI into grammar teaching in high school.Teaching grammar with CBI,student’s learning motivation is aroused and interest improved.Besides,CBI is also helpful for students to understand grammar easier and apply grammar better.Applying CBI to grammar teaching not only rises students’ grammar scores but also improves their English comprehensive competence.Compared with the traditional grammar teaching methods,CBI is more appropriate for grammar learning for high school students.