Teaching English Grammar At Senior High School Based On Situated Cognitive Theory

As we all know, in order to help students get well prepared forcollege entrance examination teachers tend to spend too much timeand efforts on English grammar teaching．Those, who may possess agood ability in reading and writing, are relatively poor at listening andspeaking．That’s why they are nicknamed silent English learners as theyhave little chance to put the target grammar into situation-basedpractice．According to the New English Curriculum Standard for MiddleSchool, the aim of English teaching is to enable students not only toattain a high degree of linguistic competence, but also to acquire theability of using language to communicate with others effectively inconcrete situations.In recent years, there have been more and more researchesconducted by scholars and teachers about situation-based languageteaching both at home and abroad. However, there arecomparatively few in-depth researches that concern the application ofsituation-based English grammar teaching in senior high school. Thesituation-based teaching discussed in this paper is based on situatedcognitive theory, which lays emphasis on students’ cognition. It isdifferent from situational language teaching focusing on sentence drills.This paper deals with the teaching of the relative clause and aims toidentify the effects of situational English grammar teaching byconducting a survey before and after the grammar classes andrecording students’ oral and written performances.Based on the data analysis, conclusions can be made as follows:English grammar teaching based on situated cognitive theory iswelcomed by students as they feel less tension and become moreactive in taking part in classroom activities; English grammar teaching based on situated cognitive theory doesn’t mean abandoning theteaching of English grammar rules. On the contrary, it provides a betterway for students to deduce the rules by using the target grammar indifferent situations; English grammar teaching based on situatedcognitive theory can be naturally connected with listening, speaking,reading and writing skills through situations created and is helpful toimprove accuracy and complexity in English writing. In grammarteaching, several rules should be emphasized so as to make situationsmeaningful and teaching effective. Situations, where students areencouraged to develop their communicative competence, aresupposed to be closely related to students’ daily life and meet therequirements of their psychological state of mind.