Integration Of Explicit And Implicit Grammar Teaching In English

In the field of foreign language teaching, the question of "whether grammar should be learned consciously or acquired unconsciously" has always been the controversy among scholars and researchers. This divergence led to different teaching methods in foreign language teaching activities. As to grammar teaching, different linguists claimed their own points of view from different perspectives. Traditional teaching supports explicit grammar teaching represented by grammar-translation method or three Ps. Explicit grammar teaching has its own advantages, for example, grammatical rules could be fairly clear through teacher's explanation and students'attention is greatly attracted to language forms. Through large quantities of pattern drills, students can master grammar items firmly and remember them deeply. Taught with this method, students can usually get high marks in grammar tests. However, the traditional grammar teaching lays too much emphasis on language forms, and the whole class is teacher-centered, as a result, it is less effective to mobilize students'enthusiasm in learning. In the 1970s, with the prevalence of communicative language teaching, the opposition between explicit method and implicit method became more and more obvious and the status of explicit method was shaken; more and more scholars at that time advocated implicit method. Implicit grammar teaching puts language points into context in order to make learners see clearly how language meaning and function are affected by context, so that they can learn grammar through context. However, the implicit method puts too much stress on the role of students. And students are expected to find, conclude and learn grammatical rules themselves through language activities. Under this teaching model, students cannot receive systematic grammatical knowledge; therefore, there still remain many grammatical mistakes in their outputs. Up to now, the divergence between explicit method and implicit method is still a big dispute in foreign language teaching.The author believes that explicit method and implicit method have both advantages and disadvantages, but they are not contradictory. According to the specific features of students and the actual environment and conditions of teaching, teachers should make a good balance between those two methods and adopt an integrated method. Setting the difficult grammars in reading as examples, this thesis raised a new integrated grammar teaching method; that is the integration of explicit and implicit grammar teaching. This integration is put forward on the basis of several theories such as the general model of information processing, the input hypothesis, the output hypothesis and the interface position. The author presented correspondent integrated teaching models according to the characteristics of the selected reading passages and target grammars. Among those three examples set in this thesis, example one and example two are firstly taught with implicit method and then explicit method, while example three is firstly operated with explicit method and then implicit method. And the detailed procedures of each example are stated concretely. Through the author's careful plan and narration, readers can get a comprehensive and clear realization about the whole process of this integration.Through demonstration of those examples, we can see that the integrated teaching method is better in teaching difficult grammars in reading. In the process of teaching and learning, the roles of teacher and students get a good balance; students'learning activity and initiative is raised, and their outputs are more accurate and effective; besides, what is more important is that students can have a full and correct understanding about the grammatical rules and also they can use target grammars to communicate fluently. This is the real unity of form and meaning.