The Application Of Communicative Approach To English Grammar Teaching In Higher Vocational Colleges

The commonly used approaches to English grammar teaching, such as grammar-translation approach, direct approach and audio-lingual approach have obviously been proved effective in grooming the grammar skills of students in terms of text structure, content or conception. However, according to the error analysis of students'examination in grammar aspect and the experience of some academics, the foremost problem of Higher Vocational College students'English grammar is not in the aspects of syntactic rules, but in the application of the syntax, that is, students don't know how to use English syntax to express their ideas.Based on the researches at home and abroad about the effect of communicative approach on English grammar teaching, this thesis puts forward the feasibility of applying communicative method to English grammar teaching, and attempts to test the positive effect of this method on improving vocational college students'grammar level by teaching experiment. The specific research questions are: 1) In contrast with traditional approaches to grammar teaching, is communicative approach able to more effectively heighten students'grammar ability on the whole? 2) Will communicative approach be able to bring positive impact on other respects of students'English learning?Guided by previous proposed research questions, the present author selected by pretest respectively 35 students from two parallel classes of Accounting Majors in Rizhao Higher Vocational College as the participants of the experiment, and then conducted the teaching experiment lasting for 16 weeks in the two classes (one is the control class and the other the experimental class). The traditional grammar-translation approach was employed in the control class. However, the experimental class adopted the communicative approach. The results of the Questionnaires, the pretest paper and the posttest paper were analyzed with SPSS 13.0 in quality and in quantity.The research findings were: 1) Compared with traditional approaches, communicative approach is able to more effectively heighten students'grammar ability. 2) What's more, this approach can also give students some help in their English learning in terms of vocabulary usage and reading comprehension. Finally, further grammar teaching suggestions were provided and the limitations of this research and proposals for the future study were also pointed out.