The Necessity Of Combining Grammar-translation Method And Communicative Language Teaching In English Reading Teaching In Senior School

In the last3decades China has witnessed a steady improvement EnglishLanguage Teaching. However, the English teaching in many schools is still far frombeing satisfactory and it is unable to meet the needs of political and economicaldevelopment in our country. Reading is regarded as the most important skill amongthe four skills of language learning; therefore it is also the skill which teachers traintheir students most. The traditional Grammar Translation Method (GTM) and theCommunicative Language Teaching (CLT) have played important roles in readingteaching; but at the same time, they also have hampered the effectiveness ofteaching.Since GTM and Communicative Language Teaching became popular in westerncountries in1950s and1970s, they have been introduced, advocated, and researchedin China. A lot of experimental researches and theoretical analyses have been carriedout. Language teachers in different educational levels put these two methods intoteaching practice, and at the same time they design experiments to research in theirintegrative application. However, most of the researches before are related tovocabulary, grammar and English teaching, especially in college English teaching,not specific to reading teaching in senior school. In reading teaching, both GTM andCLT had played important role, but every teaching method has its pros and cons, topromote the effectiveness of teaching methods, we can adopt a method whichcombines different methods and make full use of the cons of each method to makesure the effectiveness of classroom teaching. After comparing the features,advantages and disadvantages of both teaching methods, the author in this paperfinds that the two methods can co-exist in English reading teaching.In order to find out whether the combination of GTM and CLT is effective inenhancing learners’ reading ability, a four-month experimental study was conductedin Sichuan, Hongde middle school. Two parallel classes were chosen as a controlclass and an experimental class. The two classes have the same teacher, the sametests, and the same class length and numbers but different reading teaching methods. In experimental class, all the students were taught by GTM while in control class,students were taught by the method which combines CLT and GTM. After theexperiment, the scores of pre-test and post-test of the two classes will be comparedto see the results.In Chapter one the author mainly explains why reading is more importantthan other three language skills (listening, writing, speaking), analyzes the problemsof applying GTM or CLT only in reading teaching and the significance of theresearch. Chapter two offers mainly three content: literature review that provides thetheoretical basis of two teaching methods—CLT and GTM, including theintroduction, advantages, disadvantages and related researches home and abroad; abrief comparison between the two methods; four approaches in English readingteaching approaches. Chapter three focuses on comprehensive use of two methods,including the importance, necessity and concrete implementation of combining twomethods in different stages of classroom teaching. Chapter four explains the purpose,procedure of my experiment, and provides a sample teaching plan of combing twomethods in the experiment. Chapter five is the data collection and data analysis toget result of my experiment, including pre-test and post-test and questionnairecompleted by students. Chapter six is the summary of the paper, which includes themajor findings, limitations, suggestions for further research.