Exploration Of Integrating Grammar-Translation Method And Communicative Approach In Grammar Teaching In Senior High Schools

As we all know, in order to help students get well prepared for college entrance examination, teachers tend to spend too much time and efforts on English grammar teaching. Grammar translation method (GTM for short, whenever necessary) has been popular for decades and trained a lot of students with a sound linguistic competence. Those students may possess a good ability in reading and writing, but they are relatively poor at listening and speaking. The reason is that grammar translation method is a traditional method that focuses on grammar rules and emphasizes on learning through translation from mother tongue to the target language. When it comes to real communicative situations, they are busy conceiving their ideas in Chinese and then translate them into English. They are nicknamed as "silent English learners" because they have little chance to practice the language in a teacher -dominated class.Communicative Approach (CA for short , whenever necessary) encourages students to develop their communicative competence through meaningful communication. The approach helps students to practice the target language in a contextual way in the meanwhile creates positive psychological factors in the classroom. However, in a CA based text book, grammar points are organized on the basis of communicative functions instead of being presented one by one in a scientific way, which will inhibit students from learning English grammar systematically.According to the New English Curriculum Standard, the aim of English teaching is to make students not only attain a high degree of linguistic competence, but also equip them with the ability of using language to communicate with others as effectively as possible in concrete situations. If so, the teacher's efforts should be directed mainly at providing opportunities for authentic language use, employing grammar as a resource rather than as an end in itself. Considering the fact that both grammar-translation method and communicative approach have its advantages and disadvantages, this paper recommends integrating the grammar-translation method and communicative approach to develop senior high school students' linguistic and communicative competence in English grammar teaching.