| As an indispensable part of foreign language teaching in China,grammar teaching greatly influences the English grammar learning of students.However,the traditional English grammar teaching in senior high school is often dominated by the teacher and condemned for the fact that it has the inclination of being reduced to a tool of “duck-stuffing” teaching method and thus diminishes students’ enthusiasm for English learning and leads to a poor effect of classroom teaching.How to teach grammar with effective methods has become one of the central issues to prompt the reform of grammar teaching.The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High School(2017)stresses three specific requirements for the reform: the teaching mode should help students to learn in an autonomous,collaborative,and inquiry way;the teaching content should be selected from real life and be contextualized so as to facilitate students to put what they learn into practice;the main objective of grammar teaching is to cultivate students’ ability of grammar use and grammatical awareness.These requirements to some extent necessitate the reform of grammar teaching.In recent years,informed by the Cooperative Learning and Task-based Language Teaching,group-work tasks have been widely accepted as a classroom teaching model at home and abroad.A large number of previous studies done either theoretically or empirically indicate that while the application of this kind of model in the classroom makes teaching interactive and cooperative,motivates students to learn actively,and improves the teaching in the whole,a lot of work still needs to be done in the application of the model in English grammar teaching in high schools.Thus,this study was an application of group-work tasks in senior high school English grammar teaching and aimed at answering the following two questions:1)Are group-work tasks a more efficient way to improve students’ ability of grammar use in senior high school English grammar class?2)Can group-work tasks help students enhance their initiative for grammar learning?Based on the theory of Social Constructivism and the Interaction Hypothesis,a quasi-experimental design with a control group was used for the study.The sample was made of 106 students drawn from No.1 middle school in Jiangmen city,Guangdong province,who were grade 11 in parallel classes.The experiment lasted for 10 weeks and data were collected via tests,questionnaires,as well as an interview.Group-work tasks were applied to grammar teaching in the experimental group,while the traditional English grammar teaching method was adopted in the control group.SPSS 19.0 statistical software was operated to analyze the data gathered from the experiment.Results finally showed a positive influence that group-work tasks made on improving students’ understanding and use of grammar knowledge,and on motivating students to learn. |
