The Effects Of Three-dimensional Grammar Teaching On Senior High School Students' English Grammatical Competence

The National English Curriculum Standards for the Senior High School(2017)(MOE,2018)emphasizes that grammar teaching should lead students to form a three-dimensional and dynamic grammar view.However,too much attention is still paid to the form in grammar teaching,ignoring the ideographic function of grammar itself and the specific environment of language use.To change such a form-focused teaching situation and construct a grammar class embracing form,meaning,and use,many scholars and English teachers attach great importance to the three-dimensional grammar theory.However,the author finds that most researches about the three-dimensional grammar theory make a general conclusion that this method is effective on student's grammar acquisition without no further results.Therefore,the following three research questions are designed to further study on the influences of the three-dimensional grammar teaching on students' grammatical competence:1)What effects does the grammar teaching based on three-dimensional grammar theory make on students' overall grammatical competence?2)What effects does the grammar teaching based on three-dimensional grammar theory make on the accuracy,meaningfulness,and appropriateness of students' grammatical competence?3)Why does the grammar teaching based on three-dimensional grammar theory make different effects on the accuracy,meaningfulness,and appropriateness of students' grammatical competence?In this study,102 first-year students from two parallel classes of a senior high school in Fujian Province and the attributive clause are chosen as research subjects and experimental grammar items respectively.One class is decided as the control group,taught by the traditional grammar teaching method and the other is the experimental one,taught by the three-dimensional grammar teaching method.Two tests and questionnaires are handed out and collected before and after the one-month grammar teaching.By the quantitative analysis of tests,the first and second research questions are answered.Furthermore,with the help of questionnaires,the thirdresearch question are explained.The findings are listed below:1)Compared with the traditional grammar teaching method,the grammar teaching based on three-dimensional grammar theory can promote the improvement of students' overall grammatical competence.2)The three-dimensional grammar teaching has significantly positive effects on students' grammatical performance of using grammar accurately and appropriately,especially on the latter one,while it fails to show its superiority on the meaning dimension.3)Based on the questionnaires,the reasons for different influences brought by the three-dimensional grammar teaching method are the following.Firstly,it changes students' cognition of grammar and grammar learning,promoting their awareness of observing and practicing grammar structures in the context;what's more,the contextualized grammar input,output,and feedback enable students to acquire their competence of using target grammar accurately and appropriately.Additionally,for inter-lingual translation is emphasized in traditional grammar teaching,the three-dimensional grammar teaching method does not show its obvious advantages in improving students' ability to use grammar meaningfully.The above findings confirm the superiority of three-dimensional grammar theory on improving students' grammatical competence.Therefore,teachers can guide students to observe and analyze target grammars through their processing of language materials.Then contextualized output activities can be applied to urge students to internalize the form,meaning,and use of target grammar,integrating their mastery of grammar knowledge and development of grammatical competence.