A Study Of English Grammatical Competence Of Senior High School Students Based On Passive Voice

The English Curriculum Standard of Senior High School(Experimental Version)points out that the general goal of senior high school English curriculum is to cultivate students' comprehensive language ability.As an important part of English language ability,Grammar is the basis for the development of other language abilities,such as listening,speaking,reading,writing and so on.Because of its important role in the development of learners' language,it has attracted the attention of language learners and researchers for decades.However,in practical grammar learning at senior high school,students' learning effect is not ideal.Therefore,it is necessary to discuss the current situation of grammatical competence and grammar learning of senior high school students,find out the existing problems,try to analyze the causes and put forward solutions to the problems so as to provide useful reference for the practical teaching and the research of English grammar in the future.Because of the different emphases on grammatical competence,people hold different views on grammar teaching and testing.The most representative one is Larsen-Freeman's definition of grammatical competence which includes three dimensions: grammatical form,semantic meaning and pragmatic use: Learners should not only clarify the structure of grammar,but also use it in a meaningful and appropriate way.The author develops a test paper which is based on Larsen-Freeman's three dimensional grammatical competence and from the perspective of passive voice,combining with the questionnaire to investigate 123students' grammatical competence and grammar learning situation at a senior high school in Baoxing County,Sichuan province.The research questions are as follows:(1)What is the performance of senior high school students' English grammar competence in three dimensions?(2)What are the differences among the three dimensions of grammar competence of senior high school students with different English proficiency?(3)What is the role of grammar competence in improving the English proficiency of senior high school students?The findings show that:(1)The overall performance of grammatical competence of senior high school students is in lower middle level.The performance of the three dimensionsis not balanced,the meaning dimension is the best,followed by the form dimension,the worst one is the use dimension.(2)The students with high English proficiency are significantly better than the students with low English proficiency in the three dimensions of grammatical competence;the high-level students have an excellent performance in form and meaning dimension,but a low performance in use dimension;while low-level students only have a good performance in meaning dimension,but the form dimension and use dimension are in poor performance,in which the use dimension is a little better than the form dimension.(3)Grammatical competence and English proficiency are highly correlated.Grammatical competence has significant predictive effect on the English level.It is proved that grammar plays an important role in improving the overall English proficiency.Based on the above findings,the author emphasizes the important role of grammatical competence in English teaching,and provides some references for English grammar teaching.