A Survey On The Beliefs Of College English Teachers And Students Towards Grammar And Grammar Teaching

Grammar is the basic framework of language, and grammar teaching is adispensable part of language teaching. However, due to the unsatisfactory effect of thetraditional grammar teaching, the teaching of grammar is gradually ignored or evenrejected. Nowadays, most English teachers do not pay enough attention to theteaching of grammar, and are confused about how to teach English grammareffectively. It is, therefore, necessary and important to find out the problems anddifficulties that teachers and students encounter in classroom, and then provide someuseful suggestions to change the currently “low-efficiency” in grammar teaching andlanguage learning.This paper attempts to probe into the attitudes or the beliefs of teachers andstudents towards the role of grammar and formal grammar teaching. To be morespecific, the present study tries to answer the following three questions:1)Whatbeliefs do Chinese EFL teachers and students hold about the role of grammar andgrammar teaching in Language teaching?2) What are teachers and students attitudestowards classroom application of implicit and explicit approach to the teaching ofgrammar?3) What difficulties do teachers encounter during their grammar teaching?4) What difficulties do students encounter during their grammar learning? The studywas carried out among150participants from three colleges in Jiangxi, including100English major freshmen and50teachers. The research instruments were questionnaireand a follow-up interview. The questionnaire for teachers was adapted from Burgess&Etherington (2002) and the questionnaire for students was adapted from Schulz(2001) by Doctor Huang Hui (2007) in Jiangxi Normal University.Based on the data collected in this study, there are three major findings:(1)Mostteachers and students realized the significance of grammar and grammar teachingin second and foreign language acquisition.(2)There appeared disparities andinconsistency between teachers and students towards classroom application ofimplicit and explicit approach to the teaching of grammar.(3) Both teachers andstudents had their own difficulties in the process of grammar teaching and learning, including the difficulty of transformation from declarative knowledge into proceduralknowledge for students, error correction and the authentic and complete context forgrammar teaching for teachers.Based on the findings, we can offer some vital implications for the teaching ofEnglish grammar. First, English teachers should keep on grammar instruction in theirteaching. They need to employ both explicit and explicit teaching approaches to teachgrammar. Grammar instruction should be changed from the traditionalteacher-centered mode into communication-oriented approaches. Finally, bothteachers and students should be aware of their own roles in the process of grammarteaching and learning. They should develop competence to deal with the difficultiesthey encounter in the teaching and learning of English grammar.