Application Of Situation-based English Grammar Teaching In The Senior Middle School

Grammar, as the internal discipline of language, plays an important role in language teaching. The grammar-translation method has been adopted in China as a foreign language teaching method for a long time, which overemphasizes the status of grammar. Therefore, the students' ability of communication is neglected and mute English follows. In recent years, along with the introduction of the communicative teaching method and the reform of the present middle school English teaching materials, the fostering of students' communicative ability has become the essential target of English teaching, but the function of grammar is ignored. The necessity of grammar teaching has been misunderstood to a certain extent. Though some teachers have realized the importance of grammar teaching through their teaching practice, they do not know how to teach, thus causing grammar teaching to be in an awkward position. In order to improve the present situation in middle schools, this thesis, both in theory and in practice, explores a method of teaching English grammar based on situations.This thesis aims at arousing senior middle-school students' English learning interest so as to achieve better teaching results with the situation-based English grammar teaching method. We have worked out a new model of grammar teaching by using the attributive clause, and carried out a one-month empirical study in Senior Grade One of Hunan Guangyi Experimental School in 2006. Two classes including 75 students were randomly chosen as a control class and an experimental class with the same English proficiency. In the experimental class, the situation-based grammar teaching method was adopted, while the traditional grammar teaching method was used in the control class.Data presentation contains the following parts: 1) questionnaire surveys for the change of the students' learning interest; 2) the tests of the attributive clause for the students.From the experiment, we have obtained the following results:1) The situation-based grammar teaching has great effects on students' learning interest, especially under the existing testing education system;2) The situation-based grammar teaching method is obviously better than the traditional grammar teaching method.There is no doubt that it is both feasible and beneficial to use the situation-based language teaching method in the senior middle school classroom in China, especially for the unsuccessful students, who may achieve high scores in the test.