Contextualized English Grammar Teaching In High Schools

In the process of the teaching practice of the new curriculum, grammar teaching is still an important teaching aim which teachers must lay emphasis on. In the current situation of English teaching in high schools are great differences among the teaching practice because teachers still have different opinions of the importance of grammar teaching and different understanding of the new curriculum. In one situation, some teachers maintain their traditional teaching concepts and adhere to their old teaching methods. They often adopt the teacher-oriented methods and then instruct students through intense grammatical drills with tens of thousands of grammar exercises. In this approach, students would rote-learn the grammatical rules. In consequence, the results are often less than satisfactory. In other situation, some teachers, especially the young teachers, organize "fancy" teaching activities and teaching context, but they ignore the necessary induction of the grammatical rules, therefore, the result is not so satisfactory, either.With these phenomena in sight, the paper presents a study into the practice and research of grammar teaching in context in order to improve the effect of grammar teaching. As a first step, the author of this study created a context in which proper grammatical rules were selected for teaching. Her purpose was to inspire the students through contextual elements, encourage the learners to explore new knowledge based on their existing knowledge.As a second step, students were inspired to learn on their own, to learn with each other and to learn to conclude the grammatical rules in the process of creating the context.As a third step, students were instructed not to do numerous grammatical exercises, but to practice grammatical rules in the real communication with the aid of the context. Her purpose was to inspire the students to acquire the grammatical rules through the real communication.All above is the initial exploration of grammar teaching in context in high schools and the author expects it will improve the existing grammar teaching, develop students' awareness of combining grammar with the real communication so as to improve their ability to use grammar in the proper communication context.The paper consists of six chapters. In chapter one, the author briefly introduces the significance, characteristics and innovation of the paper and its outlines. In chapter two, the author indicates the current situation of grammar teaching, especially the problems of grammar teaching in high schools in China.In chapter three, the teaching methods, teaching aims and the principles of context designing of the grammar teaching in context are discussed. In addition, a series of teaching cases provide first-hand materials of grammar teaching in context, and these cases will be analyzed in this chapter. In chapter four the author explains the experiment of grammar teaching in context, which includes the object, contents and process of the experiment.In chapter five, the author makes comparisons of the two methods of grammar teaching, that is, the grammar teaching in context and traditional grammar teaching according to the result of the experiment. Finally, in light of the experiment and the investigative results, the author indicates both the strengths and weakness of this study.