College English Teachers' Reactions To Grammar And Grammar Teaching

This study was undertaken to investigate teachers' attitudes toward grammar and grammar teaching in Chinese EFL context in the hope of finding out their preferences for grammar teaching approaches. To be specific, the study addressed the following research questions:1) What are Chinese EFL teachers' attitudes towards the role of grammar?2) Which beliefs about grammar teaching approaches are most widely held by Chinese EFL teachers?The research instrument employed in the data collection was the questionnaire adapted from Burgess and Etherington. Forty college English teachers participated in the survey. Responses from the teachers produced both quantitative data and qualitative data, and the latter were lengthier comments made by some of the teachers. The data analysis generated the following major findings:1) The majority of the teachers recognize the importance of grammar in the language system as well as its value for their students. However, there is a controversy among the teachers as to whether grammar is a good means to refine learners' language knowledge.2) In relation to various approaches to grammar teaching, there is some interesting evidence to support the teachers' favorable attitude towards Focus on Forms approaches, or explicit grammar teaching, though the teachers possess a vast array of complex beliefs about these approaches. Their preferences are likely to be influenced by their learning experiences and traditional grammar treatments in Chinese EFL teaching context. 3) Student reactions to different grammar teaching approaches reveal that student characteristics, needs, wishes may determine their teachers' attitudes towards grammar teaching as well as their teaching behaviors in the classroom.The findings from this study have shed some light on grammar teaching and learning:In the first place, both Chinese EFL teachers and learners seem to place a special emphasis on the role of the grammatical accuracy in language teaching and learning.Such preferences may stem from the traditional grammar treatments in classroom instruction. An in-depth study needs to be conducted on the question as to how to include more integrated, skilled-based grammar work in the courses of College English and relevant language teaching reforms. In the second place, explicit grammar instruction is not always represented in classroom instruction. Grammatical accuracy is very likely to be achieved in the learners' production. However, by forcing learners into communication beyond their grammatical competence, the teaching objective (e.g.learners' productive skills or communicative competence) may be hard to achieve.Finally, teachers may occasionally be explicit by designing grammar-oriented tasks in order to fulfill student needs and wishes for having explicit grammar teaching, but this does not mean teachers should adopt a grammar syllabus or structural syllabus unless the learners were English majors.