An Empirical Research On Application Of Cognitive Approach In English Grammar Teaching In Vocational School

English as a major foreign language is taken as a basic course of all kinds of schools inChina. Students in China often begin to learn English from primary schools. But due to theelementary students’ learning characteristics, most primary schools in China marginalizeEnglish grammar teaching, stressing listening and speaking. As in recent years, since manywestern teaching methods were introduced to China, the phenomenon of thinking little ofEnglish grammar teaching has seemed to be intensified. Thus the middle school Englishteaching is directly affected, as well as secondary vocational schools. English is a foreignlanguage rather than a second language in China. Chinese students learn English withoutEnglish–speaking environment. To improve the students’ comprehensive ability of usingEnglish, grammar teaching must be necessary. The more important thing now in English classis to find out proper grammar teaching approaches. Nowadays, many foreign languageteachers agree that effective grammar teaching can make language learning more easily.Especially in order to develop students’ language learning ability of sustainable development,grammar knowledge cannot be rejected.We often have a large scale of students in one class, so some western teaching modelsare not suitable for our country’s current English teaching situation. English as a foreignlanguage, the importance of the syntax is also obvious. The author has been teaching Englishin a secondary vocational school for12years. In the actual teaching process, it is found thatmost of the students’ English is not satisfied and the grammar knowledge is rather poor.Learning grammar is not the final purpose, but it is an insuperable barrier to master a foreignlanguage under the non-native environment. It is known that taking some effective andmeaningful teaching approaches can make students master good grammar knowledge. Thisthesis is an empirical research about the effectiveness of cognition approach in Englishgrammar teaching in a Chinese vocational school.The research questions mainly include:1) Can cognitive teaching approach improve the students’ interest in learning Englishgrammar?2) Is cognitive teaching approach more effective than the traditional3P (presentation, practice, production) approach for vocational students in learning English grammar?3) Can cognitive grammar teaching promote the students’ comprehensive ability ofEnglish?This study was carried out in a vocational school.80secondary vocational students fromgrade1, who majored in accounting, were chosen as the participants. The chosen students willmake a further study in colleges after three-year learning in the school. One class is taken asthe experimental class and the other class as control class. At the beginning of the experiment,all the students took a test of the basic knowledge of grammar. To ensure that their level ofEnglish grammar is equivalent, their entrance exam scores are also for reference meanwhile.During the process of experiment, questionnaires and classroom observation are made tocollect data about students’ attitude and interests in learning English and grammar. In theprocess of teaching, cognitive method was carried out on the experimental class teaching andtraditional grammar teaching method to the control class. After finishing the teaching process,a post-test of the basic knowledge of grammar and a post-comprehensive test were carried on.Through the analysis of the first-hand data obtained by the author, the main findings ofthis study include:1) Using the cognitive approach in teaching English grammar can improvestudents’ interest in learning English and the ability of thinking for themselves.2) Thecognitive approach of English grammar teaching is more effective than traditional teachingapproach.3) The cognitive approach in English grammar teaching can promote thestudents’ comprehensive abilities.