Explicit Interactive Task Instruction In English Grammar Teaching In Senior Middle Schools

It has been debated whether English grammar should be taught and in what way it should be taught in senior middle schools.There are two extreme tendencies:the traditional PPP(presentation,practice and production) approach to English teaching focuses too much on English grammar explanation,pattern exercises and the recitation of English grammar rules,while the other tendency,Communicative Language Teaching, neglects English grammar teaching.Shortcomings of the two ways have been very obvious.The traditional grammar teaching neglects students' communicative competence, with the result of students' inability to communicate fluently with others in English. Communicative Language Teaching results in language fossilization and affects the accuracy of language output.Therefore,people have been looking for a proper way of grammar teaching which can get balance between form and meaning,accuracy and fluency.Based on the research concerning the explicit and implicit knowledge studied abroad and the present foreign language grammar teaching in China,Chinese scholars Dai Weidong & Ren Qingmei(2006) put forward the Explicit Interactive Task Instruction (EITI),which refers to the instructional strategies employed to raise learners' conscious awareness of form or structure of the target language while improving communicative competence.In order to identify the effect of the Explicit Interactive Task Instruction in the senior middle school English grammar teaching under the present examination situation,an empirical research as a comparative study was performed.Data were collected via the following instruments:pre-test and post-test,interviews,classroom observation and the experiment.The experiment was designed in the following ways:the experimental group received the Explicit Interactive Task Instruction in English grammar teaching while the control group received the traditional PPP approach in English grammar teaching.The study attempts to answer the following questions:1) Will the Explicit Interactive Task Instruction to English grammar teaching in the senior middle school improve the learners' English grammar level more effectively than the traditional PPP approach?2) Will the Explicit Interactive Task Instruction to English grammar teaching in the senior middle school increase the learners' learning interest,confidence,learning strategies and motivation more greatly than the traditional PPP approach?The examination results from the two-month experiment proved significant difference in English grammar proficiency measured according to the popular NMET(National Matriculation English Test) between the learners taught with the Explicit Interactive Task Instruction in English grammar teaching and those taught with the traditional PPP approach,and the results from interviews and classroom observation also indicated that the learners taught with the Explicit Interactive Task Instruction improved their English learning interest,confidence,learning strategies and motivation more greatly than those taught with the traditional PPP approach.Generally speaking,the Explicit Interactive Task Instruction is more effective for English grammar learning and teaching than the traditional PPP approach in the senior middle school.