A Study Of Application Of Communicative Grammar Tasks In Senior High Schools

Grammar instruction of the English language has had a long history in China, but thereseems to be little improvement concerning the approach to grammar instruction. Despite thestrong appeal to apply task-based language teaching (TBLT) to actual teaching, the prevailingmethod was and remains to be the PPP model (Presentation, Practice and Production). Themodel is considered unsatisfactory since it results in teacher-centered lessons. Minimizing thelearner roles and their opportunities to use the target language, this kind of traditional,teacher-fronted lessons is apparently against the notions of communicative language teaching(CLT) and TBLT. The present study attempts to measure grammar gains and the subjects‘attitude towards grammar learning through performing communicative grammar tasks.Drawing extensively on the communicative grammar tasks carried out by Fotos and Ellis (1991)in their studies of the Japanese College students, the communicative grammar task of this studyaims to integrate grammar instruction and communicative language use. The two researchquestions addressed here are whether the communicative grammar task successfully enhancedlearners‘knowledge of the target grammar points and whether they stimulated negotiation ofmeaning assumed to facilitate second language acquisition.84senior one students and theirEnglish teacher from Songjiang No.1Senior High School participated in the one-month study.A week prior to the experiment, the participants took a grammar pretest consisting of fifteengrammaticality judgment items and fifteen multiple choices. At the end of the experiment, apost-test identical to the pretest was taken immediately. The keys to the test were not givenuntil the participants finished their post test. After two weeks, a retention test, which wasdifferent from the pretest but containing what had been discussed during the lesson, wascarried out to measure the maintenance of the gains the subjects had acquired in the post-test.The data were analyzed by SPSS. The limited results of this study give positive answers to thetwo research questions. To investigate the subjects‘attitude towards the communicativegrammar task and TBLT, an interview was administered at the end of the experiment. Thoughthe number of the interviewees was limited, some thought-provoking information was elicited.Most of the participants, including the teachers considered learning grammar throughcommunicative grammar tasks was great fun and an effective tool. They admitted that compared with the traditional, teacher-fronted grammar lessons, learning grammar throughcommunicative grammar tasks motivated them and gave them more opportunities to speakEnglish in the classroom. Judging from the classroom observation, the learning atmosphere ofthe communicative grammar task group was much denser, with every student taking an activepart in the task. Moreover, students‘sense of cooperative learning was enhanced by poolingtheir wisdom together. Thus, communicative grammar tasks can be recommended as analternative to grammar instruction in the Chinese context. It is suggested that more researchescan be conducted with larger population with a view of validating the effectiveness ofcommunicative grammar tasks. In addition, a wider variety of communicative grammar taskswith different levels of difficulty should be designed so that students at each stage can benefitand will not get bored.