Research On The Application Of Concept-based Approach To English Grammar Teaching In High Schools

Grammar teaching is an important part of English teaching in high school, aiming to improve students’ comprehensive language ability. What we need to think about is how to teach grammar effectively. At present, there are several grammar instructions at home and abroad; some emphasize the communicative function, some stress the grammar rules, and some also focus on the meaning of grammar. Within the meaning-focused approach such as the task-based approach, the understanding of scientific grammatical concepts is inadequate. In most of the current teaching practice, teachers use 3P approach(presentation-practice-product).Under this approach, students know the forms of grammars and remember many grammar rules, but they know little about of the grammatical concept and meaning of the grammars. Recently some foreign researchers have done some study on the newly concept-based approach, and have applied it to the teaching of Spanish grammar and Chinese grammar,proving the effects. Due to the above situation, I try to apply the concept-based approach to English grammar teaching in high school to promote the understanding of grammatical concepts and finally master the grammars.This research is based on socio-cultural theory,conceptual metaphor theory and image schema.The teaching experiment is carried out according to the five stages of concept-based approach: explanation, materialization, communicative activities, verbalization and internalization, to explore the following two questions:(1) What are the effects of concept-based approach to the English grammar teaching in high school?(2) What do the students think about the concept-based approach ?In order to prove the effects of concept-based approach, the author carried out the experiment in two classes taught by the author herself from a high school of Yongzhou city. The two classes are parallel classes, one as the control class and the other as the experimental class. The control class received the 3P instruction and the experimental class received the concept-based instruction. The study lasted one month. And three research tools were used in the study: pro-test and post-test, interview and questionnaire. Before the beginning of the experiment, the participants received a pro-test. The data of the tests were analyzed by SPSS Statistics 21 and the results figured out that the students of the two classes were at the same English level, and there was no significant difference between them. After the experiment, both of the two classes were assessed by a post-test. The data of the tests were analyzed by SPSS statistics 21 again. The results indicated that the average scores of the experimental class were much higher than those of the control class, and there existed significant difference between the two classes. Interviews were conducted before and after the instruction in the experimental class and questionnaire was given to the students in the experimental class.The results of these two tools showed that the concept-based approach received positive feedback greatly and students can understand the grammatical concepts vividly and the meaning of grammars further. The study found that the effect of the concept-based instruction is much better than the effect of 3P instruction in English grammar and also promotesthe students’ understanding of grammatical concepts.Limitations of this study include that the author is not familiar with the statistics, so the method used to analyze the data is very simple and the data are not analyzed comprehensively. Moreover, since concept explanation is complicated work, covering a wide range of knowledge, it is difficult for teachers to explain it at length, which also impels the teachers to learn continually.