The Application Of Frequency Effects In Junior High School English Grammar Teaching

Frequency has been regarded as an important part in language acquisition theory when the Behaviorism was prevalent. Frequency effect is considered as an effective way to learning language. But by the end of 1950 s, with the development of Chomsky's nativism and universal grammar theory in the linguistic field, frequency effect has gradually ignored by people. In recent years, many research results of new branches of science oppose nativism. The famous linguist Ellis(2002) points out that frequency is the decisive factor of language learning, and language proficiency doesn't rely on abstract grammar rules, but is based on the large quantities of language samples which memorized in the brain. Frequency effect was ignored for a long time but Ellis' s view arouses scholars' attention to frequency effect again.Although there are many scholars criticizing frequency effect, in this way, we can also infer that frequency effect is complicated.So many scholars at home and abroad had made correlative researches on the frequency effect. Among these researches, many of them study on listening, speaking,reading and writing, but seldom on grammar. Grammar is a part of the linguistics, and communication is based on grammar, in other words, communicative competence depends on grammar. The goal of language learning is to cultivate the overall language ability and communicative competence. So grammar learning is very important in the language learning. And the author has an internship in the junior high school. Based on these, this thesis mainly studies on the application of frequency effect in the junior high school English grammar teaching.The author chooses two parallel classes who in Grade 8. The study is conducted on both quantitative and qualitative basis, and it mainly discusses the teaching efficiency of frequency effect on four grammar points, including subject-verb concord,article, present progressive, past tense. According to the result of pre-test and post-test in experiment group and control group, the author analyzes the data using the SPSS22.0. Among the interval of the two tests, the author as the observer records the inputfrequency and the output frequency, in this way, the author can analyze the reasons of the differences between the two tests and contrast the error rate of the four grammar points. As a result, we can infer that whether the frequency effect in the grammar is positive. The research result is that the grades of experimental class are higher than the controlled class because of the increase of frequency, which proves that frequency effect has a positive effect on grammar teaching. Frequency effect can promote students' attention to language content as well as language form, and it also can develop their overall language ability. Meanwhile, both teachers and students approve the frequency effect and this study explores an effective way for teachers to teach grammar.