A Study On English Grammar Teaching In Junior High School Based On Content-Based Instruction

Grammar is an indispensable part of English learning,and also an important way to implement students’ core literacy of English subject.Furthermore,learning and mastering the grammar of English is the basis for developing students’ ability to learn by using foreign language.Therefore,grammar plays a very crucial role in the junior high school English classroom.The goal of learning grammar is not only to make students memorize the knowledge of grammar,but also to integrate the semantic and formal aspects of the grammar into the specific use of the language so that students can use the language to communicate.Teachers sometimes attach importance to teaching grammatical rules instead of developing students’ communication skills in the process of teaching grammar.Content-based Instruction(CBI),a relatively advanced foreign language teaching model,originated from the “immersion programme” in the 1960 s,which mainly aims to understand its cultural background and professional knowledge of other disciplines through learning language.In recent years,there are relatively few studies on applying the CBI model to English grammar teaching in junior high school,but many scholars have conducted empirical research on it in high school or college.Therefore,taking the tense grammar of simple future tense,past continuous tense,and present perfect tense from the second volume of Grade 8 as an example,the study applied the thematic teaching mode of CBI to English grammar teaching in junior high school to explore the feasibility and effect of implementing CBI mode in English grammar teaching.In the course of this study,two natural classes with a total of 60 students were chosen as the experimental and the controlled classes in a junior high school in Wuhan.In this study,the researcher first administered a pre-questionnaire survey to two classes in order to determine their level of interest in grammar,and then administered a pre-test of grammar to two classes to determine their level of grammar.During the four-month experiment,the experimental class learned English grammar by CBI model and the controlled class learned English grammar by PPP model.After the experiment,a post-questionnaire survey was conducted on the experimental class to investigate the students’ learning attitude under the CBI mode of teaching,and a score test was conducted on the two classes to assess whether the students’ grammatical ability was improved.According to experimental results,compared with PPP teaching model,grammar teaching in CBI model can better make students interested and motivated to learn grammar as well as to improve their ability to use grammar.