Effects Of Explicit Interactive Tasks On English Syntactic Development Of Junior Students

Grammar teaching,as an important part in English teaching in junior high schools in China,has received much emphasis since the last century.Researchers both at home and abroad have put forward many teaching approaches to facilitate grammar teaching,one of which is Explicit Interactive Task.By using this teaching approach,teachers can strengthen students? awareness of explicit grammar rules with the help of explicit tasks,students can increase language output through interactive activities.This study tries to apply this teaching approach to English grammar teaching in junior high schools and test the effectiveness of Explicit Interactive Tasks.Modifications are also made as a try to perfect this teaching approach.Present Perfect Tense is chosen as the target linguistic form.Three research questions are put forward as the center of the study.Firstly,can Explicit Interactive Tasks help junior students promote the learning of Present Perfect Tense? Secondly,can the modified Explicit Interactive Tasks help junior students promote the learning of Present Perfect Tense? Thirdly,why are Explicit Interactive Tasks effective in promoting the learning of Present Perfect Tense if Question One is probed positively?To answer the research questions,an experiment is designed and thirty five students in Grade Seven participate in the experiment.The experiment lasts for four weeks.A pretest is done in the first week,followed by one Explicit Interactive Task in each week and a post-test after each task.Task One is a standard version of Explicit Interactive Task.Task Two,however,serves as a modified version of Task One.Task Three,as a modified version of Task Two,is the last try to perfect the teaching approach in this study.Data is collected after each test has been done.Conclusions are made after the data is analyzed by SPSS 16.0.Firstly,Explicit Interactive Tasks are effective in helping junior students promote the learning of Present Perfect Tense.Secondly,Explicit Interactive Tasks are still effective in different ways after being modified through changing the forms of reading and exercising material.Thirdly,Explicit Interactive Tasks are effective in that it combines the advantages of the traditional grammar teaching methods and the advantages of interactive teaching approach.