| It has long been focused by linguistic researchers and foreign language teachers whether the grammar teaching of target language should be included in the process of foreign language teaching. If it should be, what rules should be abided by? With the rising of communicative language teaching (CLT) in 1970s, grammar teaching which was then treated as obstacle to the cultivation of learners' communicative competence was gradually ignored, and even was excluded from the foreign language teaching process. However, a plenty of researches which were conducted in the past few years revealed that the implicit language learning advocated by CLT is not sufficient for learners to master certain language items (Harley & Swain,1984; Swain,1985; Swin & Lapkin,1989), and meanwhile they also indicate that explicit language learning is necessary in foreign language learning, because it plays a positive role of promoting accuracy of target language using.The current study intends to answer the following questions:1) what is the major perception of CLT held by English teachers in Sichuan junior middle schools? And how do they practice CLT? 2) In the framework of CLT, which kind of grammatical teaching is more efficient to improve foreign language teaching in junior middle school, the implicit one or the explicit one? In order to address the two research questions, two parts of the research are included in this study:an investigation and a five-month classroom experiment.What should be mentioned in particular here is that the explicit grammar teaching involved in this study doesn't mean to backtrack to traditional grammar teaching. The explicit grammar teaching takes "focus on form" as its theoretical basis, which is proposed by Long (1991). It suggests that notice on forms should be contained in a communicative classroom whose main focus is on meaning.The study includes two parts:a questionnaire investigation and a classroom experiment. The author intends to probe into the true reality of practice of CLT in junior middle schools in Sichuan province. A questionnaire is therefore designed and conducted before the classroom experiment. The subjects of the questionnaire investigation are 200 English teachers in 10 junior middle schools in Sichuan province. They are Qingyang experimental junior middle school in Chengdu, Da feng middle school in Xindu, Guanghan NO.3 middle school, Zigong NO.4 middle school, Neijiang NO.6 middle school, Panzhihua NO.4 middle school, Nanchong NO.6 middle school, Leshan NO.10 middle school, Changning middle school in Yibin, Bazhong NO.4 middle school. The results of the investigation reveal that:1) most of the subjects lack a full comprehension of CLT; 2) traditional role of teacher remains; 3) the classroom where explicit grammar teaching happened is not communicative. Then the author conducts a classroom experiment in Dafeng middle school so as to find an efficient teaching method for junior middle school English teaching. The subjects of the classroom experiment are 104 junior middle school students in grade one in Dafeng middle school. This experiment lasts five months. Both the teaching methods adopted in the experiment are in the framework of CLT, and the classroom where the experiment is conducted is communicative. The teaching method conducted in experimental class is focus on form, or called explicit grammar teaching in the frame of CLT in this thesis. Furthermore, the teaching method conduced in control class is pure CLT, or called implicit grammar teaching in the framework of CLT in this thesis. The classroom experiment results imply these:1) grammar teaching is important and necessary in English teaching in junior middle school; 2) explicit grammar teaching is more efficient than implicit grammar teaching to promote foreign language learning in the framework of CLT.With the pedagogical implications obtained from this research, the study is conducted in the hope of helping ELT teachers in Chinese middle schools to improve their teaching skills in their teaching practice. |
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