An Empirical Study On Application Of Explicit Interactive Task Approach To Discourse Grammar Cloze Ability Cultivation For Junior High School Students

Discourse Grammar Cloze(DGC)is an effective means to test students’ comprehensive language ability and distinguish their English level.It is also an important question type to check English core competency of junior high school students.However,for the must-have question type in the Academic Test for the Junior High School Students(ATJHSS),students’ performance is unsatisfactory.With regard to classroom grammar teaching,traditional grammar teaching pays too much attention to the explanation of grammar rules and mechanical memory and ignores the cultivation of students’ comprehensive language ability.Combined with the English teaching practice in China,Chinese scholars Dai Weidong and Ren Qingmei put forward the approach of Explicit Interactive Task(EIT),which aims to help learners raise their consciousness to the target grammar and improve their comprehensive language ability through classroom interaction.Based on analyzing students’ difficulties in DGC,this research attempts to apply EIT to classroom grammar teaching and explore the effectiveness of EIT in improving students’ performance in DGC.To find out the research problems,three research questions need to be discussed: 1)What are the existing problems for students in completing DGC? 2)To what extent can EIT approach improve students’ performance in DGC? 3)What is the effect of EIT on improving students’ lexical,syntactic and discourse performance? And which aspect of the improvement is the most significant? In this study,both quantitative and qualitative methods are used,including questionnaire,tests(pre-test and post-test)andinterview.73 subjects were selected from class(1)and class(2)of Grade 8 in a junior high school.Class(1)is chosen as the experimental class while Class(2)is chosen as the controlled class.The experimental class adopts EIT approach,while the controlled adopts traditional grammar explanation teaching method.After twelve weeks’ teaching and research implementation,the author of this study applies SPSS 24.0 to analyze collected data.The major findings are as follows: 1.students performance in DGC is unsatisfactory,the problems lie in lexical,syntactic and discourse grammar items.2.EIT approach is effective to improve student’s performance in DGC.3.EIT approach has different effects on the improvement of lexical,syntactic and discourse items.The improvement of lexical items is the most significant,and the improvement of the syntactic items is the least significant.