| In the history of English language teaching in China, grammar teaching has been the major target of classroom activities, and learning grammar rules has been the main task of Chinese students. Teaching grammar and learning grammar, therefore, have become the main melody of English teaching. Recently, changes have taken place in the field of English teaching, especially on the methods of teaching grammar in the China's middle schools: implicit methods of learning grammar rules are replacing explicit methods, class activities are beginning to focus on developing students' communication skills rather than grammar rules. This change is a big step towards modern language teaching and learning. It is of great significance to English teaching and research. However, the reformation of this kind started not very long. It is still at the stage of fumbling and trying. The present paper is a research on the grammar teaching episodes in the classrooms of China's middle schools based on the data from corpora.Grammar teaching episodes refer to such classroom teaching activities as: (1) Presentation and explanation; (2) Practice of grammar rules, (3) Real communicative activities. Since correcting grammatical errors that students make is also regarded as an important grammar teaching method and grammar acquisition procedure, error correction is also one of the targets of investigation in this research. These activities are obviously distinguished from those by which teachers teach English vocabulary and pronunciation from perspective of contents. Each of these activities are identified and investigated in the research as individual items.The data for this research are retrieved from two sub-corpora of existing corpora built by School of Foreign Studies, South China Normal University led by Prof. He Anping. They are: classes presented by teachers who had won the first prize in English Teaching Competition in 1998 (hereinafter referred to as "Excellent Classes", marked as MSCT 2) and classes presented by teachers in Guangdong Province (hereinafter referred to as "Ordinary Classes", marked as MSCT 3). Two periods of classes from these two corpora (there are four altogether)have been selected at random for a pilot study. First, the different grammar teaching methods employed by teachers at different stages identified and modeled: Presentation & Explanation, Practice, Real Communicative Activities, and Error Correction. Then all of them are tagged with a new set of symbols distinguished from conventions in classroom transcriptions. At last, these taggers are searched in the four periods of classes, in order to obtain the search items for data retrieval in the next step. After obtaining the search items, the author searched all the classes in two sub-corpora individually and obtained a series of data. Finally, the statistical data are analyzed compared. They are resource of the result and conclusion of this thesis. The purpose of doing so is to answer the following questions:1. Whether the Presentation and Explanation in Excellent Classes is more implicit than that in Ordinary Classes?2. Is the ratio between Meaningful Practice and Mechanical Practice bigger in Excellent Classes than that in Ordinary Classes?3. Are there more Real Communicative Activities in Excellent Classes than those in Ordinary Classes? And are there more varieties of forms of Real Communicative Activities in Excellent Classes than those in OrdinaryClasses? 4. Are the methods of Error Correction more varied in Excellent Classes thanthose in Ordinary Classes?Results of analysis show that: Firstly, Presentation and Explanation in Excellent Classes are carried out more implicitly than in Ordinary Classes; Secondly, Meaningful Practice in Excellent Classes is less than that in Ordinary Classes, and Mechanical Practice is more than that in Ordinary Classes; Thirdly, there are more Real Communicative Activities in Excellent Classes than those in Ordinary Classes, and the forms of Real Communicative Activities in Excellent Cla... |
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