Teaching English Grammar From The Perspective Of Context

For many years, most teachers in high schools have taught English grammar by way of explaining examples that contain grammatical points and asking students to do exercises on them. As these examples are isolated sentences without appropriate contexts, teachers often have difficulty in telling students the exact meaning of the particular sentence involved and how to use the grammatical rules in an appropriate way. In a word, the communicative function of grammatical rules has been largely neglected in the teaching of English grammar and students are unable to raise their English proficiency through the learning of grammar in the way it has been taught. Thus it is our task to pay close attention when we teach English grammar to the linguistic context in which grammatical rules are involved for the real purpose of grammar teaching, that is, for the purpose of enhancing students’ability to use English.This paper is to explore the method of teaching English grammar within contexts and the importance and feasibility of adopting this method. To do this, we make a review of the concept of "teaching within contexts" and then use teaching English model verbs within contexts as an example to show its role in teaching English grammar. Finally, we explore whether the concept can be appropriately applied to the real practice.An experiment on the method is designed and performed. Based on the analyses of the statistics, the result shows that the method of teaching English grammar within contexts, in comparison with the more traditional way, can play a very positive role in enhancing students’enthusiasm in English learning and improving their ability to master complicated English grammar.