An Experimental Study On Discourse-Based English Grammar Teaching In Senior High School

English grammar is a very important part of English teaching in China.How to carry out English grammar teaching efficiently is one of the problems that English teaching researchers have been discussing.Under the traditional concept of grammar teaching,the daily grammar teaching process lays more emphasis on the explanation of rules and structures,followed by a large number of mechanized exercises.This kind of “indoctrinatory” teaching mode is monotonous and boring,which leads to students’ low interest in learning and low efficiency,and even causes anxiety when many students use it.In addition,the new curriculum standards refer to the language ability goals: students should have language awareness and sense of English,be able to use existing language knowledge in a specific context to understand the meaning of oral and written discourse,and use spoken and written words to express meaning and communicate.In order to approach and complete this goal,English teachers should actively explore more efficient English grammar teaching methods,so that students can learn English in a pleasant way,using the language accurately and without anxiety.Harries(1963)pointed out that language is composed of a series of coherent texts rather than disordered words.Liu Wei(2011)also mentioned that discourse is a powerful means to present the way of syntactic formation.This paper takes subjunctive mood as an example and tests whether it can improve the effect of grammar teaching by using discourse in the process of grammar teaching.The subjects of this experiment were 48 and 46 students from two classes of a middle school in Shijiazhuang.The experimental class implemented discourse--based grammar teaching.Taking the grammatical subjunctive mood as an example,the experimental class focused on students’ independent cooperative inquiry and adopted appropriate discourse creation scenarios,which enables students to perceive the concrete application of the grammar,discover,summarize and practice in the discourse.The control class implemented the traditional grammar teaching,focusing on the explanation of grammar rules and structures.This study used pre-test paper,post-test paper,two questionnaires and other tools.The two test papers focus on the sametopic--the usage of the subjunctive mood.The two questionnaires mainly observed the students’ attitude change towards grammar learning and their evaluation of their respective teaching methods.The experiment lasted two weeks.The research questions are as follows: one is whether the discourse-based teaching of subjunctive mood can improve students’ learning effects of this grammar item.Second,that is whether discourse-based grammar teaching can decrease students’ foreign language learning anxiety.The research results are as follows.Firstly,the discourse-based teaching of subjunctive mood is effective in improving the students’ learning effects of this grammar item.Secondly,the discourse-based grammar teaching of subjunctive mood can decrease students’ foreign language learning anxiety.Based on the above research results,this paper proposes some thoughts on grammar teaching.First of all,teachers should deeply realize that either the exchange of ideas or the acquisition of information is carried out in a certain environment.What’s more,the ultimate goal of our English grammar class is to enable students to obtain information and exchange ideas in a specific context.Last but not the least,only discourse-based grammar teaching can help us develop students’ communicative competence and cultivate their language competence.Teachers should use appropriate discourse to create a situation for students,which will make the classroom dynamic.Students will be willing to learn and happy to learn,so as to improve the teaching efficiency.