A Tentative Study Of Task-based Grammar Teaching In S.M.S.

Grammar is an indispensable aspect of language study and it is of great importance to Chinese students for lack of original settings of language learning. However, the debate about the method of grammar teaching in foreign language teaching is still going on.Since the beginning of last century, various teaching theories and methods have turned up on the forum of foreign language teaching in western countries. Yet in China, the traditional grammar-translation method was dominant until the 1980s, and grammar had been occupying the central place in our foreign language classrooms. Since the reform and opening-up, many second language acquisition (SLA) theories and diversified teaching methods have been introduced into our country and they are like some new blood infused into our foreign language teaching. The development of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) had a significant impact on English teaching in China. Contrast to traditional instruction, CLT puts emphasis on meaning and language use rather than language form. As a matter of fact, grammar teaching includes three dimensions, that is, form, meaning and use. There is connection among the three and a change in one will have echoes for the other two. Therefore, the author thinks that the ideal effective gain in grammar learning should not only engage in language meaning and use but also focus on form to develop the three aspects of language---accuracy, fluency and complexity. Task-based Instruction (TBI) meets the demands and provides language focus at the end of the task cycle. TBI makes the activities closer to a real-life communicative situation and, above all, it meets the proceduralization of learning, the individual differences and the balance between form and meaning, between accuracy, fluency and complexity.This thesis, based on prior researches, following the theories ofKrashen's comprehensible input theory and Williams and Burden's social constructivism, explores grammar teaching by using TBI in senior middle schools (S.M.S) so as to be helpful to solve the existing problems in grammar teaching. The thesis consists of five chapters. The first chapter is a brief introduction to grammar teaching in S.M.S, in which the nature of grammar, the significance and the present situation of grammar teaching are discussed. The second part deals with TBI, the definitions and implementation of tasks and its principles and goals of TBI. The theoretical bases, the models and implementation of Task-based Grammar Teaching (TBGT) as well as its advantages are investigated in Chapter 3. The fourth chapter is an experiment with TBGT and its results. Finally, some of the existing problems are discussed and some suggestions are made for TBGT.