A Study Of Discourse-based English Grammar Teaching In Senior High School

Grammar is the foundation of English learning.It is not just a series of rules.It conveys the internal meaning of language as well.National English Curriculum for High Schools has regulated that the purpose of grammar teaching is to cultivate students’comprehensive language ability and enable students to describe things,express emotions,attitudes and opinions by using the appropriate language forms.However,there are a series of problems in senior high school English grammar teaching at present.Most teachers only focus on the teaching of grammar knowledge but neglect the training of pragmatic competence or only pay attention to the cultivation of communicative ability but ignore the training of language accuracy.Therefore,the primary task of English grammar teaching in senior high school is to seek for a way to change the situation.In the past ten years,discourse-based English grammar teaching（DEGT）has been widely recommended by experts and researchers.Compared with sentence-focused grammar teaching method,DEGT pays more attention to the context and the combination of grammar structure and function.Learning grammar in the context that makes sure students use grammar correctly and appropriately so as to achieve the goal of using grammar to improve their communicative competence.This study attempts to explore the following three questions through the empirical experiments of DEGT:1)Does DEGT enable the students to have a good command of grammar rules?2)Does DEGT enable the students to communicate in a certain context by using appropriate language forms?3)What factors might influence the effects of DEGT on students’ability of using the English language?The study required two classes（one class as the experimental group and the other as the control group）from a Chinese senior high school to participate in 14-week DEGT experiment.In the 1 ^st,7 ^th and 14 ^th week,the chosen two groups involved in the pre,mid-and post-test.The experimental group participated in DEGT experiment based on teaching materials of PEP New Senior English for China Students book 5 and 6 from the2^nd to the 6^th and from the 8^th to the 13^th weeks.Meanwhile,the control group was taught by using traditional English grammar teaching method primarily based on the sentence-focused deductive method.Finally,the experimental group was asked to finish the questionnaire in order to explore the factors that might influence the effects of DEGT.The results show that DEGT can enable the students to have a good command of grammar rules,and can enable the students to communicate in a certain context by using appropriate language forms.In addition,a number of factors which influence the effects of DEGT are identified as learner’s positive attitude to DEGT,appropriate discourse materials and proper DEGT model.Based on the results,some implications are provided for senior high school English grammar teaching:Firstly,teacher should create a supportive condition in grammar teaching to help the learners positively participate in the grammar language acquisition activity.Secondly,the meaningful practice activities should be designed to help the learners systematically acquire the grammar knowledge of forms and meaning.Thirdly,teacher should adopt appropriate techniques to correct students’errors during the grammar learning process in order to improve students’language accuracy.Lastly,appropriate and diverse discourse materials contain the target grammar items should be collected that enable the students to discover the grammar rules,describe things,express emotions,attitudes and opinions by using the appropriate language forms.