The Necessity And Feasibility Of Applying Descriptive Approach To English Grammar Teaching In Senior High School

Grammar teaching is an important part in English teaching, and teaching grammar effectively can improve students’ability of listening, speaking, reading and writing. How to teach English grammar is a big problem faced by grammarians and educators. English is the main subject in junior high school, senior high school and even in university. It is a long time and a good chance for students to learn English, but the result is not satisfactory.There are many teaching methods that are being used in English grammar teaching, but it seems impossible for students to use English like native English speakers. Traditional English lessons teach students settled rules so that students can make similar sentences according to them. These sentences can be found examples easily in students’ books, but native English speakers may think these sentences are strange in communication. A communication can be called a failure when the information cannot be transferred fluently. Furthermore, these kinds of rules or laws make students have no interests in English grammar, but language itself is vivid and interesting. In accordance with the classification of grammar, the grammar used in traditional lesson is Prescriptive grammar, and the other one is Descriptive grammar. This thesis tries to find out an effective way in English grammar teaching from the perspective of descriptive grammar.Descriptive grammar and prescriptive grammar have different attitude about language. For example, prescriptive grammarians try to tell what they should speak and write while descriptive grammarians try to describe the usage of language. Descriptive grammar can provide lots of real materials and contexts of English instead of boring rules because descriptive grammarians always pay attention to the real life. In English class, descriptive grammar can effectively reflect the thinking style and culture of English. The up-to-date technology and corpus can help teachers to carry descriptive grammar out.There are six parts in this paper:Chapter one:the background information and the significance were introduced.Chapter two:the definition of grammar and some related theories abroad and at home. Chapter three:the history of grammar and the development of descriptive grammar and prescriptive grammar.Chapter four:this part is the key chapter of this paper. This chapter tried to find out what is the proper grammar in English teaching. After contrasting the advantages and disadvantages of descriptive grammar and prescriptive grammar, this paper demonstrate the feasibility of descriptive grammar and find a way of implementation.Chapter five:it is a report according to a questionnaire conducted in Xinjiang. The analysis of it reflected the current situation of English grammar teaching, and some problems have been analyzed to prove the necessity of descriptive grammar.Chapter six:it was about the major findings and limitations of this paper. It also gave some suggestions for further research.