| Grammar has been generally believed to be indispensable in second language learning and teaching. With a brief review on the history of foreign language teaching, there are many different voices on how to teach grammar. The application of the context-based approach to grammar teaching has developed rapidly. Based on the analysis of China’s secondary vocational school students’ background, together with the studies on the application of teaching grammar in context, this paper is to investigate the feasibility of employing the context-based teaching approach in grammar lessons in vocational schools. The research focuses on two questions:1) Compared with the 3P teaching approach, can the context-based grammar teaching approach help secondary vocational school students to acquire grammar more effectively?2) In what aspects does the context-based teaching approach affect the grammar learning of students at different English levels in secondary vocational school?The author conducted an experiment of 8 weeks to find out the answers to the above questions. 98 students of accounting majors from Guangzhou Secondary Vocational School of Finance and Economics participated in the experiment. Class 1, Grade Two(n=48) was named as the controlled class and Class 2, Grade Two(n=50) was named as the experimental class. And inside the experimental class, according to the pre-test scores and the performance of English in the Entrance Examination to Senior High Schools, the top 10 students belonged to Group 1 and the bottom 10 students belonged to Group 2. The traditional 3P teaching approach and the context-based teaching approach were employed in the controlled class and the experimental class respectively on teaching the grammatical items concerning non-finite verbs. Pre-test and post-test, serving as the research instruments, were conducted at the same time within the two classes before and after the experiment to get the data of students’ grammatical achievements. The author collected the data and made analyses by using the software IBM SPSS 22.0. In addition, an interview with 5 students from Group 1 at higher level and 5 students from Group 2 at lower level was carried out to get further understanding of how the context-based approach affects students at different levels in the course of their grammar learning. After the experiment and analysis of the results, the research has two major findings.1) The context-based teaching approach contributes better to improving students’ grammatical achievement than the traditional 3P approach.2) Students at higher English level are apt to adapt to the context-based teaching approach in grammar lessons than students at lower English level.In accordance with the above findings, we come to conclusions that context-based approach in teaching grammar in secondary vocational schools is feasible. It is advisable for teachers to design the context materials elaborately enough to make students at different levels with different backgrounds understand, which would lead to achieving the final goal of grammar teaching – the accomplishment of using grammar in context appropriately. |
