| In worldwide and China nationwide foreign language pedagogy, the present mainstream is the communicative approach, which advocates fluency over accuracy and emphasizes language in use. To some students, even teachers, grammar seems to become a taboo. On the other hand, grammar is still taught by the traditional way of isolated presentation-practice and mainly on the sentence level. Under such circumstances, some questions have to be reevaluated: Should grammar instruction be renovated? Why should grammar be learnt? What type of grammar should be learned? What is the effective way to learn grammar in the classroom? Based on China's non-English major College English (NEM-CE) education, this thesis points out that both the traditional grammar instruction and neglect of grammar have brought negative effect to College English pedagogy, so it is high time to reform grammar instruction. It explores the rationale for students to learn grammar from cognitive perspectives. The psychological and cognitive language learning theories contend that learning a foreign language is the mental process of learners' hypothesis, generalization, abstraction, testing, namely assimilation and accommodation of the rules of the new language. In this process, classroom grammar instruction is no doubt a catalyst. It can add to, confirm, or modify the hypothetical rules which the learners formulate by themselves. It also argues that communicative grammar should be learned and grammar should be learned as competence in the mind rather than static rules in a book. Finally, it probes an efficient framework for NEM college students to learn grammar in the classroom –learning grammar in meaningful contexts. That can be seen as an eclectic approach to combine traditional and communicative approaches. It occurs when teachers follow a task-based syllabus, but focus learners' attention on specific linguistic properties in the course of carrying out communicative activities. It tries to reduce learners' cognitive load by inducing learners to attend to linguistic form in a meaningful context, to strike a balance between form and meaning, and to emphasize accuracy without sacrificing fluency. Learning grammar in meaningful contexts also implies a student-centered classroom, which facilitates the abstract grammar to be actually realized by students in meaningful communicative behavior. In addition, it implies a transition from sentence grammar to discourse grammar, in which grammar choices reflect concerns such as across-sentence cohesion, the creation of texture and the ways speakers and writers position themselves in texts by choices within grammatical system, such as modality, transitivity, tense, voice and so on. The classroom activities are around the texts' main ideas, text structure and the information of the content, which stress the communicative value and illocutionary act of the linguistic forms. Moreover, it demands some techniques for the teacher to provide negative feedback in the classroom. |
