A Comparative Study On Beliefs Of Grammar Teaching Between Senior High School Teachers And Students

Grammar is "a system of rules governing the conventional arrangement and relationship of words in a sentence"(Brown 1994)which can facilitate the acquisition of a foreign language and is conducive for cultivating comprehensive language competence.Most English teachers regard grammar as a frame of English learning.The grammar teaching beliefs held by teachers can affect their practical teaching behaviors in class,thus can have different teaching results in the end.Teachers' beliefs refer to teachers' thoughts about teaching process,tasks,plans and strategies.Teachers' teaching beliefs play a guiding role in their practical teaching behaviors.However,the existing researches mainly focus on studies of foreign language teachers' teaching beliefs as a whole,but there is seldom specific and in-depth study of teachers' beliefs of grammar teaching or vocabulary teaching.Therefore,this study attempts to take grammar teaching beliefs as a starting point,investigate and study teachers' and students' current grammar teaching beliefs in senior high school in Jiangxi province..Taking both quantitative and qualitative methods,this research aims to find out(1)The general picture of high school English teachers' and students' beliefs on the grammar teaching.(2)The differences and similarities between high school English teachers' and students' perceptions toward grammar teaching.(3)The degree of match between high school English teachers' actual grammar teaching behaviors and their grammar teaching beliefs.The participants in this study are 400 students and 35 teachers selected from senior grade one and two from NO.2 Senior High School of Ruichang,and 384 students' and 34 teachers' valid questionnaires are collected.Three questionnaires used are based on Andrews' framework of grammar teaching beliefs(Andrews,2003)and Gao Qiang's(2008)questionnaire on teachers' grammar teaching beliefs.After the questionnaires,4 teachers are selected for interview for the further analysis of their grammar teaching beliefs and behaviors.Statistical Package17.0 for the Social Science was applied to analyze the collected data.The results of the study are the following:(1)In general,teachers' grammar teaching beliefs and students' grammarteaching beliefs present different characteristics.Teachers' grammar teaching has the tendency of communicative teaching while students' grammar beliefs have the characteristic of integration of communicative and traditional grammar teaching.(2)There are similarities and differences between teachers' grammar teaching beliefs and students' grammar beliefs.On the one hand,there is significant difference on Form-focused,Meaning-focused and Deductive categories between teachers' and students' grammar beliefs.Compared with teachers,students prefer form-focused approach and deductive teaching,and they don't attach as much importance on meaning-focused approach as teachers.However,on the other hand,there is no significant difference on Inductive,Drilling and Metalanguage between teachers' grammar teaching beliefs and students' grammar beliefs.(3)In terms of the degree of match between high school English teachers' actual grammar teaching behaviors and their grammar teaching beliefs.Teachers' grammar teaching behaviors can basically be consistent with their grammar teaching beliefs on Form-focused,Meaning-focused,Inductive and Metalanguage.However,high school teachers' grammar teaching behaviors show the significant difference with their beliefs on Deductive and Drilling.