Integration Of GT Approach And SLT Approach In Middle School Oral English Teaching

According to the stipulations of English Curriculum Standard, the tasks ofEnglish Curriculum in middle school are to motivate and foster middle school learners’interests in learning English so that they can master certain English knowledge andform the basic skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing as well as acquiringthe ability of using the language comprehensively. Most of middle school learners inChina have acquired some English knowledge through learning English for severalyears, but their oral English level is still quite low and the phenomenon of “muteEnglish” is still very common in China, which has close relationships with theGrammar Translation Approach (GT Approach), a teaching method used widely bymiddle school teachers in China in the past years. In recent years, middle schoolEnglish teachers have realized the limitations of the GT Approach in fostering middleschool learners’ oral English and they are trying to modify the GT Approach orintroduce other teaching approaches or integrate such teaching approaches as thecommunicative language teaching approach into the classical GT Approach. However,there are seldom researches integrating the GT Approach with the SituationalLanguage Teaching Approach (SLT Approach) to foster learners’ oral English. Thisresearch concentrates on researching the integration of GT Approach with the SLTApproach in oral English teaching of middle school.Thirty middle school students from Chengdu Experimental Middle school are thesubjects of this research which employs the research methodologies of teachingexperiment and classroom observation and combines the quantitative methodologywith the qualitative methodology to collect related data. The thirty subjects arerandomly divided into two groups: the Experimental Group with fifteen subjects andthe Control Group with fifteen subjects. Besides the normal English lessons, both theExperimental and the Control Groups have a weekly experimental lesson designed bythe researcher. The experimental lessons of the Control Group only involve the SLTApproach while the experimental lessons of the Experimental Group are achievedthrough the integration of the SLT Approach with the GT Approach. Classroom observation is employed before and during the experimental lessons. This researchtries to answer the following questions:1) Whether the integration of the GTApproach with the SLT Approach can improve the English linguistic competence ofmiddle school learners better than using either the GT Approach or the SLT Approach?2) Whether the integration of the GT Approach with the SLT Approach can improvethe English communicative competence of middle school learners better than usingeither the GT Approach or the SLT Approach?3) How to combine the GT Approachwith the SLT Approach well to improve middle school learners’ spoken abilities?The research indicates that the integration of the GT Approach with the SLTApproach can improve the English linguistic and communicative competence ofmiddle school learners better than using either the GT Approach or the SLT Approach,and eventually middle school learners’ ability of using the target language can beimproved comprehensively. The GT Approach is complementary for the SLTApproach in the aspect of improving the learners’ linguistic competence, while theSLT Approach is complementary for the GT Approach in the aspect of enhancing thelearners’ communicative competence. Therefore, middle school English teachersshould integrate the two teaching approaches of the GT Approach with the SLTApproach which are complementary with each other based on their owncharacteristics, and then apply it into middle school oral English teaching.