The Application Of Data-Driven Learning To English Grammar Teaching In Senior High School

Grammar plays an important role in English teaching and learning. Although grammatical knowledge is emphasized in traditional grammar teaching, however,grammar instruction in the classroom is occupied with explanation and endless exercises. Students may not learn grammar positively and initiatively, thus, leading to unsatisfying learning results. In order to stimulate students’ enthusiasm to grammar learning, and improve efficiency of the learning effects, autonomous learning is encouraged. With the development of corpus and the concept of inductive learning,data-driven learning which is based on corpus first put forward by Tim Johns in 1991 and considered as a challenge to the traditional foreign language teaching which is usually teacher-or-textbook-centered.The present study aims to explore the effectiveness of data-driven learning on enhancing learners’ grammatical competence and improving the efficiency of grammar teaching in senior high school in the case of attributive clause, and seeks to answer the following research questions:(1) What is the effect of data-driven learning on students’ attributive clause learning?(2) Whether data-driven learning is more effective than traditional teaching method in students’ attributive clause learning?(3) What are the students’ attitudes towards data-driven learning?The study adopted an empirical method and conducted an experiment. The experiment lasted for 6 weeks and consisted procedures of teaching treatments, pretest,posttest and a questionnaire. Subjects chosen for the experiment are 80 students from two parallel classes in Hangzhou Changhe High School. One class is the experimental class, the other one is the controlled class. The experimental class conducted data-driven learning to teach AC, while the controlled class used the traditional teaching method. The pre-test and the post-test are to observe the effects of the two methods of learning on grammar learning. At the same time, students’ attitude towards data-driven learning is investigated through the questionnaire. 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 significantlyimproved in the experimental class. And data-driven learning is popular with the students. In short, to some extent, the application of data-driven learning to grammar teaching improves learners’ AC learning, which sheds light upon English grammar teaching in senior high school.