Effects Of Peer Tutoring On Senior High School Students' English Grammar Scores And Grammar Learning Attitudes

Grammar is one of the main contents of English learning and grammar teaching plays a crucial role in English teaching.There are two major teaching phenomena in the current situation of grammar teaching in many schools in China.One is that the exam-oriented education makes teachers occupy most of the time in class to inculcate grammar rules to students by using cramming method of teaching.Students have to spend lots of time remembering these rules in order to get high scores.As a result,they learn these rules passively under great pressure and lose interest in learning grammar.The other is that teachers give students many tasks and activities to complete and hardly teach grammar in order to achieve the aim of communication in learning English.Students just mechanically imitate the authentic expressions and do excessive exercises,which results in the neglect of grammar learning and partial English learning.In a word,these two phenomena lead to a big gap between grammar learning and the communication skill.But New Curriculum Reform highlights that students take the central position in learning;teachers should pay attention to students'all-around development;schools ought to encourage the cooperative learning and innovative learning.Professor Topping from the UK and Professor Fuchs from the United States began to focus on the study of peer tutoring from the beginning of the 1980s whose key idea was to teach and instruct students by their peers so that the learning atmosphere could be changed into a more active and effective one.Peer tutoring stresses the dominant role of students in learning,gives students an active atmosphere to communicate and encourages their cooperative and innovative learning.Based on the Constructivist Learning Theory,Social Cultural Theory and Cone of Learning Theory,peer tutoring advocates the active construction of knowledge and the interactive learning pattern.Therefore,this study attempts to apply peer tutoring to grammar teaching to investigate its effects on students'grammar scores and students'attitudes toward grammar learning.And this study aims to answer the following three questions:(1)What is the effect of peer tutoring on students' grammar scores?(2)What is the effect of peer tutoring on students' attitudes towards grammar learning?(3)What are students'attitudes towards peer tutoring?Participants in this research were 116 first-year senior high school students from NO.2 High School in Baotou,Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region.There were 58 students in the experimental class and 58 students in the control class.The research lasted for about three months from April in 2018 to July in 2018.The research instruments included grammar tests,two questionnaires and an interview.Grammar tests were employed to test students'grammar competence.Questionnaire1 was Grammar Learning Situation of Senior High School Students which aimed to measure students' grammar learning attitudes.Questionnaire2 was Students'Satisfaction with Peer Tutoring which was used to investigate students' attitudes towards peer tutoring after the experiment.The interview was conducted to get more information about students' perceptions and feelings of peer tutoring.The data collected in the experiment were analyzed by independent samples t test and paired samples t test in order to examine the significant differences with SPSS 17.0.In order to find more useful and supportive information,NVivo 10 was used to analyze the qualitative data.The following three points are the main findings:1.Peer tutoring improves students' grammar scores owing to its advantages:enough time for independent thinking,elaborate explanations,deep understanding and full preparation.2.Peer tutoring improves students' attitudes towards grammar learning,which results from the enhancement of learning interest,the relaxed learning atmosphere,the improvement of expression ability and the encouragement from peers.3.Students hold positive attitudes towards peer tutoring,which can be found in the improvement of grammar scores,the improvement of grammar learning attitude and the improvement of learning ability.They benefit a lot from peer tutoring and perceive it as an effective method.However,the experimental sample of this research is limited.Future research can employ students from different settings,different grades and cultural backgrounds.The classroom observation as a method of data collection is recommended in future studies to show students'actual performance in class in time.And peer tutoring can also be applied to the teaching of other grammar points and other aspects of English to further prove its effectiveness.