An Empirical Study On Discourse-based English Tense Teaching In Senior High Schools

It is widely acknowledged that English grammar plays an important role in English learning and having a good command of it to some extent helps shape a good English learmer.Therefore,both teachers and students make their great efforts to“conquer”it.However,the result is far from satisfactory.As an important grammatical category,English tense learning facilitates learners5 accurate use of language while the improper use of tenses may cause misunderstandings or confusions.But the fact is that today's English tense teaching is influenced by the traditional English grammar teaching with teachers playing a dominant role in class and grammatical points are mainly presented in isolation.As a result,students tend to lose their interest in grammar learning and also have difficulty applying grammatical rules to real communication.Discourse-based grammar teaching is a new approach which has received an increasing attention in recent years.Teachers attempt to teach grammar at discourse level in contrast with the traditional way of teaching grammar at sentence level.This thesis,mainly based on three-dimensional grammar,aims to find out the effects of discourse-based English tense teaching on students5 grammatical competence,interest in and attitude towards grammar learning,and to provide some practical suggestions for teaching grammar in senior high schools.Therefore,this thesis conducts an empirical study to answer the following two questions:(1)What effects does discourse-based English tense teaching have on senior high school students' interest in and attitude towards grammar learning?(2)What effects does discourse-based English tense teaching have on senior high school students' grammatical competence in terms of grtammatical form,grammatical meaning and grammatical use?In the experimentj two parallel classes of grade one in a senior high school are chosen with one as the experimental class and the other as the control class.The experimental class adopts the discourse-based method,while the traditional method is employed in the control class.To answer the two research questions,a questionnaire,a pre-test and a post-test are handed out before and after the experiment in this study.And an analysis of the results via the SPSS statistical analysis software shows that:(1)the discourse-based teaching model performs better in enhancing students,interest in grammar learning and changing their attitude towards grammar learning compared with what the traditional teaching model does;(2)the discourse-based teaching model performs better in improving students,grammatical competence with the traditional teaching model as a contrast.In fact,this research provides an empirical basis for applying the discourse-based approach to senior high school English grammar teaching and the findings of this study will cast some light on and have some implications for future studies.