A Study On Application Of The Communicative Approach To Grammar Teaching In Senior High Schools

For foreign language learners, grammar rules are a shortcut to master a language. Ifthey have mastered grammar, they can improve learning efficiency. Though today’scollege entrance examination is appealing to concentrate on the students’communicative competence, grammar teaching has never been ruled out in foreignlanguage teaching. No matter when we flip through a textbook from senior high school,we can still find there are systematical and detailed explanations for grammar.From new curriculum standard (2003), we can see that the ultimate purpose oflanguage learning is to cultivate the ability to use language comprehensively. Therefore,grammar teaching in senior high school should also concentrate on cultivating thestudents’ ability of using language. That is to say, to develop students’ communicativecompetence. Based on the framework of communicative approach, the author conductan experiment teaching in senior high school. Under the guidance of communicativeapproach, the teacher no longer asks students to do large number of mechanical exercise.Instead of it, the teacher will fully considerate the students’ characteristic and theenvironment of grammar learning. In order to stimulate students’ interest, the teachershould put grammar training to specific situation. So the students can master grammaritems easily and can use language flexibly in the specific context.In order to check the effectiveness of using communicative approach in grammarteaching in senior high school, the author takes an experiment teaching in HechuanMiddle School. The experiment teaching includes two questionnaires and two testpapers. The grammar items mainly involve attributive clause and the predicate verb, andthe experiment teaching will last six weeks. There are two classes for this experimentteaching. Class10is the experiment class and class17is the control class. Inexperiment class, the author uses communicative approach to teach grammar items. Incontrol class, the author uses the traditional method to teach the same grammar items.The experiment teaching is mainly to explore the following three issues:(1) In foreignlanguage teaching in senior high school, whether teaching grammar in communicativeapproach can help students master the grammar items more easily or not?(2) In foreign language teaching in senior high school, whether teaching grammar in communicativeapproach can arouse the students’ learning interest more effectively than the traditionalmodel?(3) Whether teaching grammar in communicative can improve students’listening comprehension and communicative competence or not?The purpose of the pretest is to demonstrate the English level of the two class haveno significant difference which can guarantee the effectiveness of the experimental data.The post-test mainly involves the grammar items that are involved in the experimentteaching. And the purpose of it is to analyze the differences between experiment classand control class after the experiment teaching. By means of the experiment data, wecan draw a conclusion that teaching grammar used communicative approach not onlycan help students master grammar items easily but also can arouse the students’ interestto learn English and improve their communicative competence.