Application Of DDL To Dynamic Grammar Teaching

It is well acknowledged that grammar teaching, which has long been regarded as one ofthe most important aspects of EFLT, bears two serious problems. One is bad teaching effects.Although teachers explain nearly all the grammar points clearly, students still make some bigmistakes when using English. The other is students' lack of interests in learning grammar. Ananalysis of the students' TEM 4 Grammar & Vocabulary results and another questionnaireprove that both students and teachers regard grammar as a big headache.Traditionally grammar is seen as a static product that consists of forms that are rulegoverned, sentence-level, absolute, and constitute a closed system. However, grammar shouldbe regarded as a dynamic process in which forms have meanings and uses in a rational,discursive, flexible, interconnected, and open system. In order to master the whole grammarsystem, students need to view grammar as an integration of morphosyntax, semantics andpragmatics, which can be called "dynamic grammar". With such a new conception of grammar,a new approach to grammar teaching is needed. Only with such a new approach can learnersmaster the grammatical knowledge accurately, meaningfully, and appropriately. It is calledDDL (data-driven learning).To date back, pedagogical researchers have applied several approaches to grammarteaching. According to their different ways of teaching, the methods can be divided into twocategories, namely product approach and process approach. Product approaches are those thatcarefully present specific aspects of the language for the students such as Structuralistgrammars and GT. Process approaches encourage creativity and self-discovery by students asthey experiment with the language such as Task-Based and CLT approaches. Product approachignores students' learning autonomy and initiative with heavy occupation of teachers'explanation, which may not be right all the time. For Process approach, because of its emphasison meanings, students are likely to use communicative strategies to express themselves clearly,but their language level is not improved. Sometimes, their own conclusions about somelanguage points may not be totally true without teachers' guidance. DDL is one possible way tobridge this gap between the Product and Process approaches to teaching grammar. It appears toutilize the strengths of both approaches to teaching grammar successfully.DDL is defined by Johns as "the use in the classroom of computer-generated concordancesto get students to explore regularities of patterning in the target language and the developmentof activities and exercises based on concordance output". He also describes his procedures ofIdentify-Classify-Generalize for classroom based concordancer and data-driven learning. Thebasic idea of data-driven leaning can be summed up in the following points: (i) A focus on the exploitation of authentic materials even when dealing with taskssuch as the acquisition of grammatical structures and lexical items.(ii) A focus on real, exploratory tasks and activities rather than traditional "drill andkill" exercises.(iii) A focus on learner-centered activities.(iv) A focus on the use and exploitation of tools rather than ready-made or off-the-shelf learn-ware.The thesis also discusses the disadvantages of DDL and some suggestions to overcomethem and some teaching assumption which can be used by teachers in real classes are discussedlater.After a long time's practice, the writer believes that in practical grammar teaching, thestudents should be divided into two groups: intermediate-advanced and low-level students. Tosome low-level students, teachers should try to prepare some simple data from corpora anddesign some clear and easy lead-in exercises for them. They can learn to observe thecollocations of some key words and try to work out some simple rules by themselves. Afterconsulting the data with KWIC format, students should get the chance to see the texts with fullsentence structures, which will be better for beginners to learn to study with DDL. To someproficient students, teachers should try to offer learning data as many as possible. Sometimes,teachers can even encourage them to process data on their own by means of someconcordancing softwares, thus they can get the chance to deal with real data in corpora.