The Study Of English Communicatively-based Grammatical Instructions On The Attributive Clause In Senior Middle School

It is obvious that grammatical knowledge is one of the components in communicative competence. In recent years, the research study focuses on communicative competence, communicative strategies and that of cross-cultural communication but ignores the empirical study on Grammatical Instructions based on China's fundamental education of English. Confronting the conditions, there is division between Grammatical Instructions and Communicative Instructions, which treats the teaching of English Grammatical Instructions as means to master linguistic knowledge but fewer concerns on Communicative Grammatical Instructions. Thus the necessity of the study of the communicatively-based grammatical instructions is evident and also indicates the implication and direction for Senior Middle School English teaching by employing the communicatively-based grammatical instruction.The present study of the thesis was based on Hymes' communicative competence and Littlewood's & Harmer's teaching continuum of communication. Hymes' communicative competence includes both linguistic competence and communicative competence; Littlewood's structural activities, quasi-communicative activities in pre-communicative activities and Harmer's five sets of communicative characteristics in two dimensions in non-communicative activities, belong to the first communicative strategy of Littlewood's; Littlewood's functional activities, social interactive activities in communicative activities and Harmer's five sets of communicative characteristics in two dimensions in communicative activities, belong to the second communicative strategy of Littlewood's. On the other hand, Skehan's three standards and Freeman's dynamic principles of "grammaring" provide the feasibility about how to bridge the gap between the Grammatical Instructions and the Communicative Instructions since Skehan claimed that the highlights of "accuracy, fluency and complexity" of a language is "the triangle decoder" to reach the mutual accumulation of linguistic competence and the application of linguistic competence; Freeman's "grammaring", is not only the dynamic process in the pattern formation of a language but also the use of linguistic forms to produce meaning in context-appropriate ways, which is a kind of linguistic skill.The experimental study of the thesis, based on the above theories, created the modified SCNQA model to justify the effectiveness of the Communicative Grammatical Instructions through the qualitative description and quantitative study of the T-test on the aid of SPSS11.5. The subjects of the experimental group & the controlled group were randomly selected from the Attached Senior Middle School of Xinjiang Normal University. The experimental group used the Communicative Grammatical Instructions; the controlled group employed the Grammatical Instructions but both with the same teaching materials, the same time and the same teacher from November, 20^th, 2005 to September 13^th, 2006.The findings proved that the Communicative Grammatical Instructions might improve Senior Middle School students' overall English proficiency more effectively than Grammatical Instructions.There are six chapters in this thesis: Chapter 1 remarks the introduction of the purpose of the present study and the significance of the Communicative Grammatical Instructions; Chapter 2 deals with the literature review at home and abroad in both Grammatical Instructions and Communicative Instructions. Thus, it provides the necessity and feasibility of the Grammatical Instructions based on the previous theories and results; Chapter 3 is the theoretical bases of Communicatively-based Grammatical Instructions; Chapter 4 is the present study, including introduction, hypotheses, sampling subjects, the experimental designs and the empirical methods and procedures of the subjects; Chapter 5 is the data collections and analysis of the T-tests of the subjects; Chapter 6 is the conclusions of the experimental study including the limitations and implications.