Inheritances And Innovations Of Grammar Translation Method In College English Teaching

In College English Teaching, most of the teachers usually adopt the traditional Grammar Translation Method (GTM) with the purpose to consolidate the students’ language knowledge. The classroom is always conducted under the mode of "Rule by the voice of one man alone" and "Cramming system". Although this kind of teaching method has some advantages to a certain degree, it is helpful for the learners’language knowledge consolidation and their reading and writing ability, even is useful for improving the students’translation ability. It also has some disadvantages, for instance, the students’oral language ability will not be improved--if they study under the Grammar-translation mode for a long time, they may lose the interest and initiative to communicate with others, which may result in the situation that they just learn what they should learn, but they cannot use it in the real life. Obviously, this teaching method cannot completely meet the developing need of the new trend. To some degree, it should be inherited, innovated and adopted by combining with some new teaching approaches, such as Cognitive Code Method(CCM) and Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), only by doing this can the students’language ability get a more comprehensive development and improvement. For this purpose, by taking a case study, this paper analyzes the teaching effects, the advantages and inadequacies of GTM, and then reaches the conclusion that GTM should be inherited and innovated in College English Teaching.This paper studies from five aspects:Chapter One introduces GTM, including its origins and theoretical basis, the teaching effects, and its influence on the students, as well as the students’ attitudes to this teaching method. In addition, in this chapter, it also discusses some criticisms on GTM and the pursuit of New Approaches.Chapter Two mainly discusses about CLT. This method appeared at a time when language teaching in many parts of the world was ready for a paradigm shift. It appealed to those who sought a more humanistic approach to teaching, one in which the interactive processes of communication received priority. This chapter gives an overall introduction about its principles and a further analysis about its advantages and problems of this teaching method.Chapter Three analyzes the inheritable aspects and innovations of GTM in College English Teaching. With enlightenment of the principles and objectives of CCM of70th century, the author found a lot of similarities between CCM and her ideal teaching method, that is, to integrate the advantages of CLT into the traditional GTM. Only Inheritances and Innovations of the Grammar Teaching Method (i.e. by the integration of the Grammar Teaching Method with CLT) can change the poor situation in College English Teaching. It specifically discussed the Inheritable aspects such as strengthening the students’ basic language knowledge and a training of the students’ reading and writing abilities. Besides, it emphasized the importance of the students’ language comprehensive ability to their further study. Then the second part of this chapter indicates that the GTM still requires some innovations such as the improvement of students’ listening and speaking ability and encouragement of their subjective initiative. According to McKeachie’s Teaching Tips,"The best way to keep the students’ attention in class is not to force the students to be concentrate in a class for more than one hour, instead, to make a proper pause during a long time class will be a good adjust for them to be focus." The author also takes Bligh’s research results into consideration, designing a modified GTM. Furthermore, she inserts the conception of "one minute composition " into her design and makes it as a "five minutes reflection in class". At the end of this chapter, the author draws a detailed conclusion and analysis about the specific characteristics of the modified GTM.Chapter Four consist of two case studies. Through the two studies, it gets some summaries of the views of this thesis. After the experiment, the author does a survey and an interview of the students’ and the teachers’attitudes towards the Modified GTM to further prove the benefits of this method. Meanwhile, she also collects some useful suggestions about the improvement of this method.At last, the conclusion of this paper including the new findings, inadequacies, and future development trend of this thesis. Through the study of this thesis, the author hopes to offer more views and inferences for College English Teaching field to make some contribution to widen this study of this field.