A Contrastive Study Of Attitudes To Grammar Teaching Between Middle School English Teachers And Students

Along with more and more international communication, English becomes more and more popular. English as a major foreign language is taken as a basic course of all stages of schools in China. Under the influence of curriculum reform in our country, English teaching modes have been developed and traditional grammar teaching methods have been improved. English grammar teaching has been a hot issue for a long time among scholars. Many researchers home and abroad have done a lot of study on efficiency of English classroom grammar teaching. Currently, the most popular English grammar teaching theories home and abroad are Langacker’s cognitive grammar teaching theory, implicit and explicit teaching theory. Also, these theories are popular among English teachers in junior middle school.For a long time, many researches have been conducted to inspect students’ and teachers’ attitude toward English grammar teaching, learning interests and difficulties they have when learning or teaching English grammar. This thesis, based on Meaningful Learning Theory by D.P Ausubel, inspects the efficiency of English grammar learning and teaching in junior high school. And after the research, a contrast between students and teachers will be made to find the differences and similarities. Meanwhile, according to different students, some effective suggestions are made to help teachers find proper teaching methods to enhance students’ interests and confidence.In order to make a comparison between students and teachers’ attitudes on English grammar teaching, learning and difficulties, instruments of questionnaire, interview, English test and class observation are employed among 79 students and 5 teachers in Nanjing Zhonghua middle school. The materials used are junior one textbook of Yilin version and the related exercise book. The students’ questionnaire data are analyzed through EXCEL and presented with tables, graphs, and charts. The responses of interview about explanation on choices of students’ previous questionnaire and teachers’ attitudes are recorded. Some typical responses are sorted out and discussed in this thesis. After questionnaire and interview, the tests are provided for the students to see the high-frequent mistakes they have in daily exercise. Grammar lesson observations are followed to check the real classroom grammar teaching.According to the differences and similarities between teachers and students’ attitudes, it can be found that most students view grammar as the important part of English study. Students with good grammar knowledge support initiative learning style and implicit teaching methods while the relatively weak students depend much on teachers’ direct instructions. Additionally, teachers’ classroom teaching is mechanical and scattered, so students feel the time for grammar lesson is very limited and grammar teaching is dull. As for the implication of the results in this research, teachers should make their grammar teaching more systematical in order to help students conduct meaningful learning and make teaching process more efficient and suitable for different levels of students.