Interactive Activities In Grammar Teaching To Junior School Students

The ultimate goal of language teaching is to cultivate students' ability to communicate information and express ideas. Grammar is a vital device and resource for comprehending and using language, and teaching is the prerequisite to gain accurate linguistic knowledge and fluent communication. Whether to teach grammar or how to teach grammar has become the focus of debate by many linguists and it has been a stubborn problem for our teachers in the middle school. Owing to a long period of dominance of the Grammar Translation Method in the language classroom, grammar has always been taught as product to the students in the language teaching, and it may be helpful for the elementary students. However, the teaching activities that are designed to be teacher-centered are relatively dull and static and there is little interaction between the teacher and students.This paper, from a new viewpoint, expounds a new approach to grammar teaching by interactive activities while demonstrating that grammar is essential in language teaching and grammar should be taught in the classroom. In the paper, the concepts of interactive activities and other relevant concepts are based on the discussion by prominent linguists.In order to apply interactive activities to grammar teaching effectively, we have discussed and proved true that grammar plays a very important role in language. Language without grammar would be chaotic, and grammar teaching is a vital component in language teaching, existing in the whole language teaching activities. In the classroom, teachers will not only explain grammar points elaborately but also teach the students how to utilize them for communication correctly and appropriately. Before designing effective activities in grammar teaching, we have discussed and compared some useful concepts about activities, tasks, and exercises in detail.After the analysis on characteristics of classroom interaction and importance of interactive activities, we apply some interactive principles to grammar-teaching activities, and illustrate the nature of interactive activities, that is, what happens in a class between the teacher, students and the text to achieve the goal of teaching. In classroom interaction, almost everything that is done with a communicative intent without the exception of gaining real linguistic knowledge, teaching is more student-centered than teacher-centered and classroom performance is managed not just by the teacher, but also by all present. All interactive activities associated with listening, speaking, reading and writing must be meaningful and they fully engage the students' minds and imaginations. Such activities are designed to achieve two objectives: one is to facilitate the students' attitudes and motivation in grammar learning, and the other is to balance students' linguistic and communicative competence. Each well-designed interactive teaching activity generally should stress certain clear aim or task, participants, auxiliary materials and procedure in according with listening, speaking, reading and writing activities. However, these activities are seldom performed solely and absolutely, but often combined with other activities for use. For example, listening activities can be considered in speaking activities.Although these interactive activities may promote our grammar teaching in theory, and to a certain extent (for example, in the middle school), this new approach is effective, they are to be tested by our actual teaching and practicing. Moreover, when designing and implementing such activities, the teacher had better consider the individual difference of the students and his role in the activities as a real participant to cooperate with students. This paper aims to provide a new way to grammar teaching for the middle-school English teachers and in the meanwhile, hopes the teachers may improve on it during employing this new approach.