Integrating Explicit And Discourse

Explicit grammar instruction is commonly used in senior high schools nowadays.This instruction puts emphases on grammar forms and drills to enhance accuracy and proficiency of using grammar rules.This instruction is to increase knowledge of grammar rules but ignore the meaning of grammar.Learners can't comprehend the meaning and use of language and fail to communicate in actual situations.Students can always learn the grammar rules through drills but fail to express the intentions and meanings appropriately in actual communication.Discourse-based grammar instruction is based on the discourse and focuses on the unity of forms and meaning of language.It considers the appropriateness and fluency of language use.However,it puts too many emphases on the function of discourse and pays little attention on grammar rules.Two instructions above have their shortages and neither of them can get a satisfactory result in grammar teaching alone.Thus,the integration of two instructions is needed to remedy the flaws of each other to help learners master the rules and understand the meaning and use of language at the same time.Then this research integrates explicit and discourse-based grammar instructions and applies it into practical grammar teaching to explore its efficiency in grammar teaching.Subjunctive mood is a conundrum of grammar teaching in senior high schools.Explicit grammar teaching helps students master the only meaning of rules.But in real communication,the meanings of rules vary according to different situations.This leads to ambiguity and misuse of language in communication.Therefore,this research takes English subjunctive mood as an example and puts forward two research questions.1)Can the method integrating explicit grammar teaching and discourse-based grammar instruction improve students' ability to apply subjunctive mood? 2)Is the integrated method much more effective,compared with the explicit grammar instruction,in improving students' ability to apply subjunctive mood?To answer two questions above,a grammar teaching quasi-experiment is carriedout based on Schmidt's noticing hypothesis and Searle's speech act theory by adopting qualitative and quantitative methods.During the teaching experiment,two classes in grade one of Tianshui No.1 senior high school are chosen randomly as subjects.They take part in a pre-test to make sure all the participants are on the same grammatical level.A four-week grammar teaching of subjunctive mood is conducted then and the experimental class adopts the integrated instruction while the control class employs the explicit grammar instruction.After the teaching,all participants have a post-test and some of students from experimental class accept an interview to express their feelings of the integrated grammar instruction.Results of all tests are analyzed by SPSS19.0 software and results of questionnaires are analyzed by EXCEL software while other results are analyzed through comprehensive descriptions.Conclusion is drawn based on the analysis and discussion of the results from the experiment.The integration of explicit and discourse-based grammar instructions is efficient in improving students' ability to apply subjunctive mood and the integrated method is superior to the explicit grammar teaching in isolation.The conclusion can be interpreted as that the integrated grammar instruction is efficient in grammar teaching and can be applied into practical grammar teaching in senior high schools to improve students' ability to use language appropriately.