A Study Of English Grammar Teaching On The Basis Of Productive Tasks In Junior High School:

Grammar teaching plays an important role in English teaching. Although grammatical knowledge is emphasized in traditional grammar teaching, and English learners have mastered grammatical knowledge, they still make lots of mistakes in their language production, which deserve a reflection. According to Larsen-Freeman,grammar is better considered as a skill or a dynamic process rather than as a static of knowledge. Swain also states that output is a cognitive process and learners’ production(i.e. output) is a key factor that affects language acquisition. Therefore, it is meaningful to consider grammar learning as a dynamic process and pay more attention to language production in the process of grammar learning.On the basis of Dynamic Grammar Theory and Comprehensive Output Hypothesis, the present study aims to explore the effectiveness of the productive task on enhancing learners’ grammatical competence and improving the efficiency of grammar teaching in junior high school in the case of English simple past tense, and seeks to answer the following research questions:(1) Does productive task have effects on improving students’ grammatical competence in past tense learning?(2) Is productive task effective in improving the accuracy of students’ past tense output?(3) What strategies can be used for specific errors in past tense learning?The study adopted an empirical method and conducted an experiment. The experiment lasted for 5 weeks and consisted procedures of teaching treatments, pretest and posttest. Subjects chosen for the experiment are 30 students from Class 5 Grade 6in Tianlin No.3 Middle School. In the treatment, guided writing, as the productive task, includes three passages mainly concerning English simple past tense. The guided writing productive task consists of three steps, including underlining key words and taking notes, orally retelling the passage based on notes and getting feedback from others, and finishing guided writing. All the data collected from pretest and posttest are entered into SPSS 16.0 to do further analysis.The results of the study indicate that the performance of learners is significantly improved after the treatment of the productive task; the productive task significantly improves the learners’ accuracy of past tense output. In short, to some extent, theproductive task improves the learners’ grammatical competence and their proficiency of past tense, which sheds light upon English grammar teaching in junior high school.