Teaching Grammar To Middle School Students With Communicative Language Teaching

With the development of linguistics, psychology and pedagogy, people are taking a new look at foreign language teaching, giving grammar teaching a new meaning, which reflects a new linguistic conception. This new conception regards language not merely as a system of rules, but as a tool for human communication. Accordingly, the traditional methods of grammar teaching should be reform.The thesis introduces the definition of grammar and importance of grammar teaching , pointing out that our problem we are facing is to teach grammar effectively rather than consider whether to teach grammar or not. After presenting the advantages and disadvantages of the traditional teaching methods, the author introduces the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) in detail, including the features, principles of CLT, incompatibility and feasibility in carrying out CLT in China.The author provides lots of classroom activities to explain how to teach grammar with CLT, in the process of these meaningful communicative activities, the students can discuss, analyze and practise grammatical rules. At the same time, the author takes the relative clause as an example to introduce strategies of grammar teaching in the framework of CLT in detail.An experiment is conducted to test whether grammar teaching with CLT is suitable to senior middle school students, and whether teaching grammar with CLT is more effective than in the traditional grammar-translation method. One grammatical item--the passive voice was chosen for the experiment .The experimental result shows that teaching grammar with CLT is acceptable and better than the traditional grammar-translation method. The enlightenment from the experiment is that grammar should be taught in communicative situations combined with its forms and functions.