Application Of Context Based Three-dimensional Grammar Teaching In Senior High School

Grammar teaching plays an important role in English teaching.It has always been a heated topic about how to teach grammar in English teaching.As is known to all that the ultimate goal of grammar teaching is to cultivate students' ability of communication and make them communicate in English in daily life when it is needed.Larsen Freeman(2003)puts forward the three-dimensional grammar theory which holds that grammar has three inseparable dimensions:form,meaning and use.Teachers need to concern these three dimensions together in the grammar teaching.According to this theory,many teachers have changed their grammar teaching method and the effect of it is obvious.However,the efficiency of grammar learning is still not satisfied and students' ability of understanding and using grammar is still weak.The context based three-dimensional grammar teaching method can change the way of students' memorizing the grammatical rules in grammar class and help students perceive and understand the form and meaning of grammar by presenting some contexts.Through the contexts,students can master grammar from the three dimensions of form,meaning and use and finally they can apply the grammar practically in real situation.Thus the ability of language use will be improved.Thus the researcher tries to combine the context theory with the three-dimensional grammar teaching and to figure out the effect of this method through experiment.The specific questions of this research are as follows:1)What are the effects of the context based three-dimensional grammar teaching?2)Which dimension does the context based three-dimensional grammar teaching affect the most(form,meaning or use)?3)How do the high school students like the context based three-dimensional grammar teaching?Two senior 1 classes from one of a senior high school in Nanjing have taken part in this research.One is the experimental class(EC),which is taught by context based three-dimensional grammar teaching,while the other one is controlled class(CC)which is taught by three-dimensional grammar teaching.There are altogether 87 students in these two classes and they are considered at the same level of grammar learning(especially the attributive clause)proved by the pretest.The experiment lasted for three months.After the experiment,a post-test was taken in the two classes to testify the effects of the two grammar teaching methods.Moreover,a questionnaire was allocated in EC to find out students' attitudes towards the method.Through the results of the tests and questionnaire,the conclusion can be made as follows:1)The context based three-dimensional grammar teaching does good to students'grammar learning.It can improve the efficiency of both learning and teaching.2)The context based three-dimensional grammar teaching can improve students'understanding of the meaning as well as the using of grammar.3)Students are fond of this method.They think the contexts can arouse their interests to learn grammar and to understand the grammar in real situation.