An Empirical Study On The Application Of The Whole Language Approach To The Grammar Teaching In Senior High School

Grammar teaching is an important and necessary part of English teaching. As apart of language knowledge, grammar plays an important part in fully developingEnglish learners’ learning skills. The final goal for English learners of learninggrammar is to put what they have learnt into practical use. English Teaching has beendeveloped for a long time and there have been a lot of teaching methods. In thesedifferent methods, English teachers and researchers pay attention to many importantproblems, such as whether we should teach grammar and how to teach. With thedevelopment of these teaching methods, researchers put forward many ideas andmodels on grammar teaching, for example, the traditional Grammar-translationMethod, Task-based Grammar Teaching, ppp model, the Implicit and Explicitgrammar teaching, etc. Many teachers and theorists have attempted to fuse implicitand explicit types of instruction by advocating approaches that allow learners tofocus on form within a communicative context. Bonnie Adair-Hauck, RichardDonato,and Philomena Cumo advocate what they refer to as a “whole language”approach to teaching grammar and they put forward a new model—PACE, which isthe fusion of both explicit and implicit views designed to integrate meaning, form,and function in all aspects of classroom language instruction.After reading a lot of materials, the writer tries to apply the whole languageapproach to the grammar teaching in Senior High School in this research in order tofind a better way to teach grammar.100Grade-Two students are chosen as thesubjects of this research and the research lasts one and a half months. This researchtries to prove the following hypotheses:(1) The PACE model based on the wholelanguage approach can be applied in Chinese real classroom and better improvestudents’ grammar learning compared with traditional ways.(2) The PACE modelcan arouse students’ initiative and learning interest. The subjects are divided into thecontrol group and experimental group. Subjects in the control group accept the traditional grammar teaching instruction and students in experimental group acceptthe new teaching model based on the whole language approach. There are two testsin this experiment and the data are collected to analyze the teaching effect. And thetwo hypotheses are proved that the new model based on the whole languageapproach better improve the mastery of grammar points for the subjects and it canarouse students’ initiative and learning interest of students’ grammar learningcompared with traditional ways.