A Survey Of English Grammar Teaching In Junior High School In Jiaozuo City

Grammar is essential to language learning,and grammar teaching has always been an important part in foreign language teaching.Therefore,understanding English grammar teaching has great significance for improving English teaching.At present,there are still relatively few empirical studies exploring the current situation of English grammar teaching in junior high schools in China.Previous studies mainly adopt the method of questionnaires to investigate English teachers’ attitudes and methods of English grammar teaching,with a lack of in-depth research on English teachers’ actual practices of grammar teaching in classroom.Therefore,a more in-depth and focused study of English grammar teaching in junior high schools is needed,to understand the status quo and make suggestions for English grammar teaching in order to improve English grammar teaching in junior high school.This study will investigate how junior high school English teachers teach grammar in their actual teaching practices in Jiaozuo City using questionnaire survey and case study.The research questions are:(1)What are English teachers’ views on and practices of grammar teaching in junior high school in Jiaozuo City?(2)How do English teachers actually teach grammar in classroom in Jiaozuo City?(3)Are English teachers’ stated views and practices consistent with those observed in classroom in Jiaozuo City? If there are inconsistencies,what are the reasons? To answer these questions,first,questionnaires were distributed to 84 English teachers from 8 junior high schools in Jiaozuo City to investigate the English grammar teaching in Jiaozuo City from a macro perspective.Then classroom observations and interviews were conducted with 4English teachers at Jiaozuo S.Junior High School to study the actual grammar teaching of English teachers.The major findings were as follows.(1)In terms of views on English grammar teaching,most junior high school English teachers believed that grammar was both a constituent element of language and an important guide for language output,recognized the necessity of grammar teaching and paid attention to students’ language use in Jiaozuo City.Concerning the practices of grammar teaching,English teachers commonly conducted explicit teaching and implicit teaching,deductive teaching and inductive teaching,and intensive teaching and decentralized teaching to teach grammar.Most teachers employed Task-based Teaching Approach and Situational Teaching Approach.More than half teachers corrected students’ grammatical errors immediately and involved students in the evaluation of grammar learning.In general,English teachers’ views on and practices of grammar teaching accorded with the three-dimensional grammar theory.(2)In classroom,junior high school English teachers were observed to mainly conduct deductive,explicit and intensive teaching,and use Grammar-Translation Approach and Task-based Teaching Approach to teach grammar.Teachers were observed to mostly delay the correction of students’ errors in speaking and conduct the teacher-led evaluation.Teachers’ actual practices of grammar teaching in classroom and the views reflected had more relation to the form-focused view of grammar.(3)There were inconsistencies between English teachers’ stated views and practices of grammar teaching and those observed in classroom due to the influence of objective factor,student factor and teacher factor in junior high school in Jiaozuo City.Based on the above findings,the study put forward some feasible suggestions to improve the grammar teaching in junior high school.