A Research On Chinese Middle School Students，Grammar Consciousness-raising

As the reform and opening to the outside world develops intensively, demandfor proficiency English speakers keeps increasing. Influenced by such trend, mostmiddle school students are not learning English just to get high marks on variouswritten tests anymore; they also hope to be able to use this language fluently andaccurately in spontaneous discourse. Therefore, attitudes towards formal grammarteaching have changed and voice against formal grammar teaching has run higheronce again. Many teachers who strongly argue for communicative language teachingcall for an end of the formal grammar instruction in middle school, on the groundthat formal grammar instruction may impede the development of learners’communicative competence.However, as the drawbacks of the Communicative Language Teaching thatstudents cultivated with this method can speak fluently but not accurately due to theirlow levels of grammatical consciousness gradually reveal themselves, many teachersbegin to refocus on the role of formal grammar teaching in accelerating learners’language acquisition. Nevertheless, refocusing on the formal grammar teaching doesnot mean a simple return to the traditional grammar teaching method. In light of theWhole Language Approach and Discovery Learning Theory, the author puts forwarda new grammar teaching method after her observation of middle school students’characteristics and their special needs in learning English, hoping to find a balancedpoint between the two grammar teaching methods. This method advocates students’discovering the target linguistic knowledge on their own while engaged in using it tosolve some practical problems in a real context generated by the narration of somemeaningful discourse.In order to test the feasibility and efficacy of the method the author carries outan empirical research. The empirical study is carried out at No.7middle school ofZhengzhou for eight weeks, involving sixty senior high school students from two natural classes in grade two. The research instruments include one pre-experimentalquestionnaire, two written grammar proficiency tests, two oral accuracy tests and aninterview with some students from the experimental class at the completion of theresearch. The scores of the tests are analyzed by using different statistic methods inSPSS16.0. The results of this study have revealed that compared with the traditionalPPP teaching method, the new grammar teaching method can result in much moresignificant improvement on upper-intermediate level learners’ ability to speakaccurately in spontaneous discourse with their ability to get good marks on writtengrammar proficiency tests not being impaired, which indicates that it is feasible andefficient in helping students in middle schools gain their two learning goals at thesame time.