Grammar Teaching In Senior High School Within The Communicative Approach

There is no doubt that grammar plays an important part in English teaching in high school.However, whether to teach independently and how to teach worry a lot of teachers for long,which has been a controversial issue. In the traditional class, the teacher make use of quantitiesof exercises to teach students grammar rules, which leads that the language knowledge becomesthe aim of teaching, and ignores the host of students in class. As a result, English learningchanges into a procedure of remembering passively, which has to be avoided.The thesis starts from various teaching methods both in and abroad to research thedevelopment of grammar teaching. It proves the importance of grammar teaching in high schoolto introduce of current situation of grammar teaching in China. As for the awkward status ofgrammar teaching, the thesis discuss about it under the framework of communicative approach.The communicative approach bases on the communicative competence and puts the emphasis onthe communication which is the final aim of language learning. Thus, English teaching in highschool should be developed in the communicative class. Besides the improvement of students’grammar level, the teacher should pay more attention to their communicative competence. Thecombination of language patterns and functions makes students learn actively, which not onlyarouses students’ initiative, but also practice the grammar rules effectively in communication. Insuch kind of class, it is very important for teachers to change their traditional role and forstudents to be the hosts for class.In order to identify the effect of the communicative approach in teaching, the thesis adoptsthe teaching experiment, accompanied by the questionnaire and tests. The experiment mainlydiscusses about the problems as follows:1. Could the communicative approach used in grammar teaching in high school improve thestudents’ English grammar level more efficiently than the grammar-translation method?2. Could the communicative approach used in grammar teaching in high school arouselearning interest more effectively than the traditional class model?3. Could the communicative approach used in grammar teaching in high school improve thestudents’ listening comprehension and communicative competence more effectively than thetraditional class model?The experiment, lasting for six weeks, was carried out in grade two, which focuses on thegrammar rules of the attributive clause and non-predicate verb. Students in the experiment hadno statistically significant differences in learning ability and language level telling from the pretest results. Traditional teaching approach was applied in the control class, while thecommunicative approach in the experiment class. Giving the post-test at the end of theexperiment, the author analyzed the results and found that: under the present assessment, thecommunicative approach is not only beneficial for the acquisition of grammar, but also forarousing students’ interests in grammar, and the communicative competence in English.