Teaching Spoken English By Using The Theory Of Functional Grammar In China

At present, traditional grammar is still very popular in English teaching in China. However, traditional grammar is a formal grammar, which looks at language as a set of abstract forms, and does not take meaning and uses of the construction into consideration. Besides, traditional grammar has a very complicated system of rules and exceptions. All these have contributed to its difficult application by English learners. Though students have mastered a large amount of grammatical knowledge and vocabulary, when they want to turn their thoughts into language, they are usually at a loss as to how to use this knowledge to organize language constituents, like words, phrases, and clauses, into a sentence. This problem is especially acute in spoken English, due to the limited time for language planning. Affected by the way used in teaching traditional grammar, that is, grammar-translation teaching method, many students would like first to organize their thoughts into Chinese, and then translate them into English. However, due to the complicatedness and abstractness of traditional grammar, and limited time for language planning in speaking, it is difficult for students to apply their knowledge of grammar well, and their translation is usually translation of words instead of translation of sentences, hence the Chinese English and many grammatical mistakes. Besides, because the process from thought to Chinese, then to English costs time, the fluency of speaking is also affected.Halliday's functional grammar looks at language from its functions. According to him, language is a social semiotic system. Language is a behavior, and the use of language is the reflection and realization of people's social behavior potential in language. (Zhang Delu b, 2005:167) The three metafunctions of language are reflections of people's experience, interpersonal relation, and textual organization respectively. Thus functional grammar is directly based on reality, and can help solve some problems caused by traditional grammar. Under the guidance of functional grammar, students no longer need to organize their thoughts into Chinese and then translate them into English; instead, they can directly organize their thoughts in English: they first decide the suitable language elements that can be used to express the concepts, and then organize these language elements into sentences according to the logico-semantic structure of English. This thesis is going to look at the teaching of these language elements, their relation with the concepts in mind and in reality, and the logical relations between these elements in English, in the hope to help the students with their language planning process for sentences that are produced through controlled language planning process.In this thesis, taking Halliday's An Introduction to Functional Grammar as its basis, taking the teaching experience into consideration, and borrowing ideas from some other researches, the writer tries to apply part of functional grammar to the teaching of spoken English through establishing a teaching procedure and content. This teaching procedure and content is further improved through feedbacks from a single-case study. Altogether, there are six chapters.In Chapter One, the reason for this research is stated. During the process of teaching, the writer found many problems with the spoken English of many students who have been taught with traditional grammar. Then the writer used some ideas of functional grammar in the teaching, and found that students have made some progress in their speaking. So the writer decided to make a systematic research on the application of functional grammar to the teaching of speaking language.Chapter Two includes a short review of history of both teaching and learning of spoken English, and a literature review of researches on the application of functional grammar to the teaching of grammar, like Sinclair's Collins COBUILD English Grammar, Lock's Functional English Grammar, and Chapter Seven of Zhang Delu's Functional Grammar and Foreign Language Teaching. Both the advantages and disadvantages of these researches are analyzed.Chapter Three provides a theoretical framework for this research through introducing language production theory of psycholinguistics, and Halliday's functional grammar theory. According to psycholinguistics, foreign language learners will undergo a stage of controlled language production before they can reach an automatic language production stage. In the controlled process, language planning is a conscious process. With the help of functional grammar, this process can be made easier.Chapter Four defines the scope of this research and introduces the research method. Grammar is a huge system worth hundreds of pages'description, so it is impossible for the present thesis to cover every aspect of it. Thus this research only examines the application of part of functional grammar to the teaching of spoken English. This chapter also introduces the subject, instruments, and procedure of the experiment. Besides, the first and second steps of the procedure are introduced in detail.Chapter Five is the main body of the dissertation. It introduces the third step of the experiment, which is intended to establish a set of teaching procedure and content. Here the set of teaching procedure and content is introduced by phases, and the end of each phase, an interview is conducted to get feedbacks from the speaker, so as to improve the teaching procedure and content in this phase.Chapter Six mainly introduces the last step of the experiment. A posttest is conducted, which is followed by an interview. Then the data of the posttest and the pretest are compared to produce some preliminary results, which can be used as reference for further research. Besides, this chapter also examines the drawbacks of the present research as a whole and of the experiment, and proposes suggestions for further research.The creative point of this thesis lies in four aspects: Firstly, the present research draws on theories of psycholinguistics when making research on the application of functional grammar to the teaching of speaking English. Secondly, the present research draws on some ideas of traditional grammar, which are used to help the students understand some ideas of functional grammar, or used to combine with the ideas of functional grammar to establish a new teaching functional grammar. Thirdly, the present research has made adaptations to some ideas of functional grammar when establishing the new teaching functional grammar. Fourthly, the present research has reorganized the order in which the set of grammatical features are introduced.Building grammatical system is a huge project, so this thesis is not able to present a complete system of grammar. It only makes a tentative and preliminary research, the results of which may solve some problems in the teaching of spoken English. To build a complete system of grammar for teaching and application, more efforts are needed in the future.