An Empirical Study On The Improvement Of Grammatical Competence Based On The English Grammar Teaching Strategies

Grammar teaching has long been a controversial topic. As regards how to teach and what to teach, many scholars abroad and at home have put forward a number of teaching methods. But nowadays, the methods of grammar teaching are still traditional. Many factors, such as old teaching ways, students’ low interests and so on, restrict the improvement of grammatical competence greatly. So now an urgent problem to solve is to find out the effective ways to improve the students’ grammatical competence. At present, the ways to teach English grammar and improve the learners’grammatical competence can be often found abroad and at home, but there is little research on the connections between the grammar teaching strategies and the improvement of grammatical competence based on the statistical analyses.Based on the previous research, this study defines grammatical competence from the following two parts:basic grammar knowledge and its application. By means of the pretest, posttest, questionnaires (teacher’s edition and student’s edition) and interview, and under the analysis of SPSS13.0, this study intends to solve the following problems:(1) Can grammar teaching provide positive effect on grammar learning?(2) Is there any difference between the traditional grammar teaching strategy and the target grammar teaching strategies when they are used to improve the students’grammatical competence?(3) In the experimental group (EG), is there any difference in the improvement of grammatical competence between the good students and the poor students based on the target grammar teaching strategies?This study includes the control group (CG) and the experimental group (EG), in which the participants are all from School of Foreign Languages, Anhui Science and Technology University. In CG, there are48students with8males, and in EG, there are47students with5males. Before the study, all the participants are tested to find whether they have the same English levels or not. In CG, the traditional strategies are adopted, while in EG, the study adopts the target grammar teaching strategies, including interactive activities, teacher correction strategies and authentic materials-based grammar teaching. After the analysis of the collected data and information, the study reaches the following results:(1) Grammar teaching can provide the students with the positive effect;(2) Both the traditional grammar teaching strategy and the target grammar teaching strategies can improve the students’grammatical competence, but the target grammar teaching strategies can make the students produce greater interest in grammar learning, and make greater progress;(3) In EG, the target grammar teaching strategies produce different influence on the students. In general, the good students can get more benefit than the poor students.This study is helpful to improve the students’grammatical competence, and can provide the grammar teaching with a certain brand of reference and guidance. First, this study marks clearly the connections between the grammar teaching strategies and grammatical competence; second, this study can help the teacher to know the students’learning needs so as to give the guidance. In addition, this study can help the teacher to improve their grammar teaching.There are five chapters in this thesis. Chapter one includes the necessity, purpose and the structure. Chapter two is an overview of the relevant studies on the grammar teaching and grammatical competence abroad and at home. Chapter three presents the research questions, instruments, subjects, and the collection of the data, especially the grammar teaching strategies in details in EG. Chapter four reports the result of the data, and the last chapter makes a conclusion, and puts forward pedagogical implications and some suggestions for the further study.