A Study Of English Grammar Teaching Based On Information Gap In Junior High School

Grammar teaching has always been a controversial issue in foreign language teaching. It is well accepted that language is a tool for human communication and the goal of language teaching is to develop the learners’ communicative competence. However, traditional English teaching approaches, such as grammar-translation, audio lingual and PPP approaches still focus on sentence pattern drills and grammar rules. They lay too much emphasis on language forms but neglect communicative function in grammar teaching. As a result, learners are not able to communicate effectively even though they have good grammatical knowledge. Factors account for this situation may be various, but the negligence of information gap in English should be one of the key factors. Information gap, as an important principle in communicative language teaching and a necessary element to motivate communication, makes communication meaningful. It is said that there is no real communication without information gap.This thesis is intended to explore a new way of grammar teaching –grammar teaching based on information gap with the expectation of getting grammar teaching more effective in developing students’ ability to express themselves fluently, accurately and appropriately in real world communication.In order to identify the effect of incorporation of information gap in grammar teaching, an experimental study was carried out. Two classes were chosen as samples. After one-semester experiment and observation, the grammar competence of the students in the experimental class that were treated with information gap tasks improved distinctly compared with the students in the control class. This thesis, therefore, proposes that grammar teaching be dealt with in a communicative way that integrates with information gap task.