An Action Research On The English Subjunctive Mood Teaching In Vocational Colleges

The English subjunctive mood has always been a difficult grammar point.Vocational college students are apt to make errors quite often when using it.Experts at home and abroad have done a lot of research on grammar teaching,but there is little specific research on improving the English subjunctive mood teaching through action research,especially in vocational colleges.Therefore,my study intends to do action research on this.Moreover,differences between English and Chinese as well as the different viewpoints given by grammarians on the subjunctive mood often make students confused.So it is necessary to seek a more reasonable explanation and find an effective teaching method for improving the subjunctive mood teaching in vocational colleges.This paper conducts an action research on subjunctive mood teaching in Hubei College of Chinese Traditional Medicine.First of all,58 students in one class are randomly selected as the participants.A pre-test is given to them in order to know about their acquisition levels of the subjunctive mood and their main difficulty in learning subjunctive mood is that they completely don't know where to use the subjunctive mood or even use it but in a wrong grammatical form especially in translation or writing exercises.Besides,a questionnaire is conducted to the English teachers in this college in order to learn the problems existing in the subjunctive mood teaching: 1)The way of presenting the subjunctive mood in classroom teaching is too old and lack of novelty;2)The type of exercises about the subjunctive mood is monotonous and lack of variety;3)The method of explaining keys to the exercises is too traditional.The above problems are not conducive to stimulate the students' enthusiasm for learning and enhance the interaction between teachers and students.Then,according to Larsen-Freeman's three-dimensional grammar framework,the three-stage teaching plan is made: focus on the grammatical form,strengthen the pragmatic function and enhance the use.Following the principle of cultivating students' grammar ability,a series of actions are carried out to help students have further understanding: using the psychological distance to explain the subjunctive mood from cognitive and pragmatic perspective;conducting all-round training to strengthen the use of the subjunctive mood in listening,speaking,reading and writing;creating active classroom atmosphere and improving their learning initiative by comprehensive use of a variety of teaching methods,such as group discussion,role playing,score-rewarding system,transcribing,making error-collection album.Analyzing the data of classroom observation,teacher's logs and after-class feedback throughout the action research,the teaching effect is constantly reflected and evaluated from the perspective of observers,teachers and students and made continual adjustments to improve the teaching.Then,the results of three tests and the data of two interviews show that the students' scores are improved on the whole and the gap between the high and the low is narrowed down gradually.Also,their interest in the subjunctive mood learning is stimulated and their satisfactions of the classroom teaching are greatly increased.Finally,the whole process of this study is reviewed and research findings reveal that action research is not only beneficial to solve specific problems in the actual classroom teaching,but also easy to operate.What's more,action research is an acceptable method for teachers to carry out in doing micro-scale research and it is quite conducive to their professional development.Then advice is given for subjunctive mood teaching in some aspects: ways of presenting knowledge,teachers' teaching concepts as well as teaching methods.In addition,there are some limitations in this study.The number of samples is too small and three months is a little short.Detailed analysis and discussion are not made on students' learning motivations and learning experiences,which needs to be further studied.