A Study On Grammatical Competence Of English Majors In Vocational Colleges

The basic requirement of English teaching in vocational education (2000)indicates clearly that the teaching objective of English Curriculum is to cultivatestudents’ ability in using language. Thus, in grammar teaching in VocationalColleges, students of English majors are expected to not only have a solidgrammatical knowledge, but use the knowledge appropriately.Different understanding of grammatical competence may affect the ways ofteaching and testing grammar. Larsen-Freeman (2003) has characterized grammaticalcompetence along the three dimensions: grammatical form, semantic meaning andpragmatic use. She claims that being able to use grammar structures does not meanusing the forms accurately, but using them meaningfully and appropriately.The present study, based on Larsen-Freeman’s framework of grammaticalcompetence (2003), tries to investigate grammatical competence of students inVocational Colleges in terms of grammatical form, semantic meaning and pragmaticuse. It aims to investigate the profile of the students’ grammatical competence, andtheir attitude towards it, so to inform the grammar teaching in Vocational Colleges.The research questions are:1) What are the profile of actual grammatical competenceacquired by the students? Is there any relationship among the three dimensions ofgrammatical competence?2) Is there any significant difference in grammaticalcompetence between high proficient students and low proficient students in terms ofthe three dimensions? How about their grammatical competence?3) What’s thestudents’ attitude and understanding toward grammatical competence and grammarlearning?Based on pilot study, a grammatical competence test was designed and used todescribe the grammatical competence level and identify grammar learning problemsof vocational college students.166English majors from two vocational collegesparticipated in the test. After the test, questionnaire and interviews were alsoconducted to investigate students’ views and attitudes towards grammar competenceand grammar learning.The results of the test show that vocational college students’ grammaticalcompetence is in low level. They do not possess solid grammatical knowledge and are not proficient in using. Moreover, the participants’ grammatical competence in threedimensions is not developed at the same rate and they tend to lack the awareness ofdiscourse-level grammar. Secondly, the grammatical competence of the highproficient students are better than that of the low proficient students in each dimensionof grammatical competence, and both high proficient and low proficient students’pragmatic use generally are better than their grammatical form, and much better thansemantic meaning. The results of questionnaires and interviews reveal that most of theparticipants tend to regard grammatical competence as an area of static knowledge tolearn. Though they do not enjoy grammar learning, they are willing to make attemptto it, because they associate grammar learning closely with language learning andcommunicative competence.It is suggested that neither isolated grammar instruction nor meaning-focusedinstruction in class would result in students’ development of grammatical competence.As students’ grammatical competence are in low level and there is an unbalanceddevelopment of the competence in terms of the three dimensions, integrating theteaching of grammar in communicative language teaching contexts can be adoptedand a more discourse-based approach should be implemented in Vocational Colleges.