Teaching Grammar In Context

This thesis is an exploration of grammar teaching from theoretical and practical perspectives. With entering WTO in 2002, China has become an important component of the world economic chain. In order to keep an extensive contact with other countries, China urgently needs people with solid linguistic knowledge and the ability to use English in real-world situations. To satisfy such social needs, English grammar teaching should shift from tradition, which regards grammar as an isolated, context-free and sentence-based language system, to present-day grammar teaching, which matches form with meaning and function in context, with the expectation of helping learners to achieve their ultimate goal, i.e. to use language appropriately, accurately and fluently in real communication. And teaching grammar in context is built on this view.This paper is composed of five chapters. Chapter One is a historical review of grammar teaching providing a basis for further discussion. According to Rutherford, grammar teaching has been the central part of foreign language teaching and learning for the past 2,500 years. But with the pervasiveness of communicative language teaching, whether or not to teach grammar is a controversial issue. Thus this part aims to examine the drawbacks of different methods of past grammar teaching. Chapter Two discusses Chomsky's compentence-performance distinction, Hymes, Canale and Swain's notions of communicative competence, which may help us to understand the nature of grammar. In Chapter Three, definitions are given in terms of 'grammar in context', and the distinction between decontextualized and contextualized grammar are explained and exemplified from a functional point of view, that is, from pragmatic and discoursal perspectives. Then the approaches to grammar teaching in context are proposed. These approaches emphasize the importance of noticing linguistic forms, self-discovery and being learner-centered. Learners are encouraged to pay attention to grammatical terms in the input and try to discover the use of the grammar in specific contexts through observation and discussion in pairs or groups. Finally, some techniques are discussed and tasks are designed. These techniques and tasks illustrate how the proposed approaches can be applied in teaching grammar in context.