A Study On Integration Of Explicit And Implicit Grammar Instruction In Senior High School

How to teach grammar efficiently has been a difficulty for domestic senior high school English teachers in recent decades.Nowadays,the most constantly used instructional approach for domestic senior high school English grammar teaching is explicit grammar instruction.According to Zhang(2014),to achieve the best result of grammar teaching,it is quite essential to integrate explicit grammar instruction and implicit grammar instruction,rather than just use either of them.However,most of the present researches on integrating these two grammar instructions are at a theoretical level,while the empirical studies related to this topic are relatively scarce.The study in this thesis attempts to apply integration of explicit and implicit grammar instruction to senior high school English teaching,and explore the effectiveness of this integrated instruction through an empirical study.An experimental study was performed to probe answers to the following three questions to help achieve the research objectives of the empirical study: 1)Does integration of explicit and implicit grammar instruction have superior efficiency over explicit grammar instruction in teaching senior high school English grammar? 2)What effects does integration of explicit and implicit grammar instruction have on students at different levels of English proficiency? 3)How does integration of explicit and implicit grammar instruction influence students' interest and confidence in grammar learning?The experimental study was carried out among two parallel classes of Senior One students of a national-level model senior high school in Guangdong province in the second half of October,2016.The two classes were randomly decided as control class(CC)and experimental class(EC).The number of the participants in each class is 63.Explicit grammar instruction(EGI)was conducted in CC and integration of explicit and implicit grammar instruction(IEIGI)was performed in EC.Apart from the instructional treatments,two grammar tests(pre-test and post-test)were arranged for the participants of EC and CC before and after the teaching experiment,the results of which are used to make comparison of the teaching effectiveness of these twoinstructions and their effectiveness on the participants of different English proficiency groups.What's more,a pre-experiment interview was organized for some students from different proficiency groups in EC and CC to look into the basis status of grammar teaching in junior high school as well as students' attitudes towards grammar learning;a post-experiment interview was conducted among several participants from different proficiency groups of EC to investigate whether IEIGI has any positive impact on the participants' attitudes towards grammar learning.The results of the grammar tests indicate that(1)IEIGI is significantly more efficient than EGI in teaching grammar,and that(2)the effectiveness of IEIGI on all the three proficiency groups of participants in EC is strongly significant.The results of the pre-experiment interview suggest that the traditional grammar teaching approach is widely employed by junior high school teachers,and that the participants' interest and confidence in learning grammar are at relatively low level.The results of the post-experiment interview indicate that IEIGI is able to help promote students' interest and confidence in grammar learning.In view of the results and findings of this empirical study,some concrete and practical proposals on implementing the IEIGI in domestic large-sized class are also put forward in this thesis.