An Experimental Research Into The Effects Of Three-dimensional Grammar Teaching On Junior High School Students’ English Grammatical Competence

At present,most junior high schools in China focus their grammar teaching on grammatical forms,but ignore the meanings and usages,which leads to the inert knowledge problem.Therefore,many students are difficult to use grammar consciously.This study is guided by the Three-dimensional Grammar Teaching Theory proposed by Larsen-Freeman(2005),organically combines three dimensions of form,meaning and use in grammar teaching,and mainly cultivates students’ grammatical competence on accuracy,meaningfulness and appropriateness.In this research,passive voice is selected as the target grammar to explore the influence of Three-dimensional Grammar Teaching on English grammatical competence of junior high school students.The subjects come from two parallel classes of Tongliao No.4 Middle School.Class 21 is randomly decided as the experimental class,guided by the Three-dimensional Grammar Teaching Theory.Class 13 is the control class,which is taught by using the current grammar teaching method in junior high school.Tests,questionnaires and interviews are used to collect data to answer the following two questions: First,what are the effects of the Three-dimensional Grammar Teaching on the three aspects of students’ English grammatical competence? Second,how does the Three-dimensional Grammar Teaching affect students’ English grammatical competence?The results show that 1)compared with the current grammar teaching method in junior high school,Three-dimensional Grammar Teaching has a significantly positive influence on students’ grammatical competence.2)Three-dimensional Grammar Teaching has significant advantages in developing the meaningfulness and appropriateness of the English grammatical competence of junior high school students.It adopts a large number of example sentences that include the target grammar,which encourage students to explore the structural features of target grammar independently,and improve students’ language awareness.What’s more,contextual input activities are used to guide students to build the connection between forms and meanings,and help them understand the connotation of the target grammar.These activities can stimulate students to use the target grammar meaningfully.The application of output activities combines the target grammar knowledge and application organically,which strengthens students’ grasp of grammatical forms through application and encourages students to think about the meanings and usages of target grammar in the specific context.These activities make great contributions to improving their appropriateness in using.3)The three dimensions interact jointly to promote the development of English grammatical competence of students.Three-dimensional Grammar Teaching focuses on the balanced distribution of teaching time,attaches the same importance to three dimensions,and sets sufficient contextual activities in each teaching stage to promote the transformation of language knowledge to language application ability.This study shows that the Three-dimensional Grammar Teaching contributes to developing English grammatical competence of junior high school students.Therefore,the following two recommendations have been put forward for English grammar teaching in junior high school: Firstly,English teachers should establish positive grammar teaching awareness,attaching importance to all the three dimensions of grammar teaching.Secondly,English grammar teaching in junior high schools should pay attention to the creation of real and interesting teaching situations,providing opportunities for students to use grammar knowledge.