An Experimental Study On The Effect Of Teaching Approach And Feedback Method On English Grammar Attainment

Grammar teaching has always been controversial at home and abroad.How to present grammatical knowledge to learners and how to deal with learners’ grammatical errors has become the focus of academic debate.Explicit teaching and implicit teaching present grammatical knowledge in completely different ways.The former emphasizes that teachers clearly teach students grammatical knowledge and rules,ignoring the actual communication and use of language.The latter stresses that teachers create real language situations for students and students summarize grammatical knowledge and rules in actual communication by themselves,ignoring systematic grammar teaching.Prompt feedback and recast feedback are considered to be more effective forms of feedback to deal with learners’ grammatical errors.The former is that the teacher does not provide the correct language forms for the student’s mistakes,and allows the students to correct themselves after the teacher’s repetition,guidance,and metalanguage suggestions,the latter is that the teacher’s whole or part restatement of the correct forms to the student’s mistakes.In this study,the author combined the representative grammar teaching methods with the influential feedback methods to build four teaching modes,namely “explicit teaching + recast feedback”,“explicit teaching + prompt feedback”,“implicit teaching + recast feedback”,“implicit teaching + prompt feedback”,to explore the effectiveness of Chinese English learners’ grammar attainment under different teaching modes.The study used 80 second-year students in a middle school in Suzhou,Jiangsu Province as the subjects,and used the attributive clause of the eighth unit of the first semester of the third year as the experimental grammar.The teaching for four groups students lasted for a month.Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis of students’ pretest,posttest and delayed posttest,this research has the following findings:(1)In terms of learning receptive grammar knowledge,students in the explicit teaching groups are significantly better than the implicit groups;students in the prompt groups are slightly better than the recast groups,but the feedback method has no significant influence on students’ learning of receptive knowledge.The explicit teaching + prompt feedback group performed the best among the four groups of subjects.(2)In terms of learning productive grammar knowledge,students in the prompt groups are significantly better than the recast groups;students in the implicit teaching groups are slightly better than those in the explicit teaching groups,but the teaching method doesn’t have a significant influence on students’ learning of productive knowledge.The implicit teaching + prompt feedback group performed the best among the four groups of subjects.(3)In terms of retention of grammar knowledge,the four groups of students all have a persistent grasp of receptive grammar knowledge,but the productive grammar knowledge can only be maintained in the implicit teaching + recast feedback group for long.The productive grammar knowledge in other three groups of students has been declined significantly.Based on this,teachers should select appropriate teaching modes according to the actual characteristics of the students,the degree of difficulty of grammar and the different types of knowledge in order to effectively promote the effectiveness of the students in English grammar learning.