The Features of Teaching Grammar in Middle School and Teaching Approaches1.doc

中学语法教学的特点及方法The Features of Teaching Grammar in Middle School and Teaching ApproachesContentsAbstract.1Key words.1I. Introduction .11.1 What is Grammar?11.2 The Role of Grammar.21.3 The Goals of Reforming Grammar Teaching 21.4 What Aspect of Grammar should We Teach in Middle School? .3II. The features of Grammar Teaching in Middle School.4 2.1 Conditions of English Grammar Teaching. .42.2 The Traditional Method of Grammar Teaching.5III. Techniques for Teaching Grammar.63.1 New Method “Awareness-raising ”in Grammar Teaching.63.2 Grammar in Textbooks.7IV. Several Strategies of Grammar Teaching.84.1 Analytical Skills and Comparative Skills .84.2 Providing Plentiful Appropriate Language Input.94.3 Using Predicting Skills.104.4 Limiting Expectations for Drills, Encouraging Communicative Drill.104.5 The Grammar Translation Approach.104.6 Teaching Grammar in Culture Class .114.7 Sentence Recombination.114.8 Teaching Grammar in Situational Context.12V. Steps in Presenting Points of Grammar Using Direct Instruction in ESL and Language Instruction.13VI. Conclusion.14References.15The Features of Teaching Grammar in Middle Schooland Teaching Approaches摘 要：语法是用词造句规则的综合。教学语法的目的是为了使学生掌握基本语法规则，以便更好地进行听、说、读、写等语言实践活动。由于英语和汉语在语法方面差异甚大，这就给中国学生在学习英语语法时增加了不少困难，因而学生会做出错误的归纳，这也给英语语言的学习带来麻烦。在这种情景下就需要英语教师采取更有效的教学模式和教学途径，使学生能熟悉的掌握英语语法并能够熟练的运用于交流实践中，更好地进行听、说、读、写等语言实践活动。旧的语法教学模式和教学途径以及现行的语法教学模式和教学途径有其优点但也有其不足，有待英语教师去探索和创新。关键词：语法；教学语法的目的；教学模式；教学途径Abstract: Grammar is the series of the rules that we make phrases and sentences. The main goal of our grammar courses is to give students a working knowledge of English so that they can use grammar to converse, read and write in the target language. There are a lot of differences between English and Chinese ,which give a lot of problems to Chinese students who may mix a lot of concepts of English language with the Chinese ones. So as English teachers we must take a lot of measures to help the students to learn the grammar of English, including the better models of teaching and the better approaches of grammar teaching so that the students can use grammar to converse, read and write in the target language. Nowadays the teaching models and the approaches have their weakness that need teachers to create a more fair way to teach grammar.Key words: Grammar; the goal of grammar teaching; the molds of grammar teaching; the approaches of grammar teachingI. Introduction1.1 What is Grammar?Grammar is a system of a language. People sometimes describe grammar as the "rules" of a language, but in fact no language has rules. If we use the word "rules", we suggest that somebody created the rules first and then spoke the language, like a new game. But languages did not start like that. Languages started by people making sounds which evolved into words, phrases and sentences. No commonly-spoken language is fixed. All languages change over time. What we call "grammar" is simply a reflection of a language at a particular time. Grammar is the fundamental organizing principle of a language. It can be related to many parts, in other words, grammar is a framework to describe languages. Chomsky (1957) suggested that a grammar should describe a native speaker's intuitive understanding of the language he or she uses.  According to Chomsky, just such a grammar would be the grammar that he introduced as Transformational Grammar. He initially tried to explain how actual language users created and understood grammatical structures they had never encountered in previous experience. He therefore established a set of transformational rules that explained a user's competence with language.  1.2 The Role of GrammarThe role of grammar is controversial in language pedagogy. Different ELT practitioners have different views on it. Do we need to study grammar when learning a language? The answer is "yes, grammar can help you to learn a language more quickly and more efficiently." It's important to think of grammar as something that can help you, like a friend. When you understand the grammar (or a system) of a language, you can understand many things yourself without having to ask a teacher or looking at a book. Though an observation, it shows poor grammar can reduce other English skills, such as speaking, writing ,reading. That is to say, the sound knowledge of English Grammar can improve the students speaking and writing. So it is useful to assist English teachers in high school level to accelerate the efficiency of integrating English grammar.1.3 The Goal of Reforming Grammar Teaching Chomsky (1957) suggested that a grammar should describe a native speaker's intuitive understanding of the language he or she uses. According to Chomsky, just such a grammar would be the grammar that he introduced as Transformational Grammar.  He tried to explain how actual language users created and understood grammatical structures they had never encountered in previous experience. He therefore established a set of transformational rules that explained a user's competence with language. This competence, he theorized, explained how language users could generate grammatical sentences. He explained that competence in language use did not mean a user could invoke the generative rules of the languages. language teachers and language learners are often frustrated by the disconnection between knowing the rules of grammar and being able to apply those rules automatically in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. This disconnection reflects a separation between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge. (Nancy G. Patterson the spring of 1998)Accordingly, The main goal of our grammar courses is to give students a working knowledge of English so that they can use grammar to converse, read and write in the target language.Using Language freely and appropriately is a goal of grammar that focuses on students' developing increasing proficiency in the understanding and controlling their language, including vocabulary development, word choice and syntax, and oral and writing, or other skills. That is called communicative competence, which includes ethnical language for specificity, standard English for clarity, informal usage for effect. Students should also continue to develop the ability to control grammatical conventions, including sentence formation, conventional usage, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. 1.4 What Aspects of Grammar should We Teach in Middle School ?Some educators may still want to teach an effective course simply or find a new way to teach grammar to reach the goal of grammar. In that new course, learning the language is interesting or intellectually challenging or can be made so interesting. What all students need, however, to understand and apply those aspects of grammar that are most relevant to writing or other skills for communication. But What aspects of grammar should we teach? Or how much is enough?Teaching Grammar in Context includes suggestions that we teach a minimum of grammar for maximum benefits (Weaver 1996).In this book we find a lot of ways about teaching grammar in kindergartens and in graduate schools. This is what we call a "scope-not-sequence" chart, covering relevant concepts that might be taught sometime between kindergartens and graduate schools. The chart includes five categories: 1) Teaching concepts of subjects, verbs, sentences, clauses, phrases, and related concepts for editing; to make simple sentences to express our minds correctly in speaking or in writing. 2) Teaching styles through sentences combining and sentences generating to more correctly understand the native English. 3) Teaching sentences sense and styles through the manipulation of syntactic elements. 4) Teaching punctuation and mechanics for convention, clarity, and style. 5) Components of grammar and syntaxAlthough this full chart includes most of the grammatical concepts needed for sentences revision, style, and editing, and some concepts are listed in the developmental sequence found in research studies, neither the sets of objectives nor the detailed lists should be understood by presenting a sequence for instruction. What's appropriate at any given time will vary considerably from school to school, class to class, and even from individual to individual. Therefore, our suggestion is that teachers should firstly study the chart carefully, and then offer various kinds of guidance to meet students need according to their levels (though some basic grammatical concepts may need to be taught during the writing process and other processes.). At the very least, teachers in a school or school system decide what should be taught to their students at each level, though with considerable overlap(It also includes what should be taught and when should be taught).For example, teaching concepts of subjects should be taught in junior middle school Grade Two. It depends on the ability of students understanding. Teachers could collectively decide what the teachers at each grade level should be responsible for teaching, but the students who demonstrate the need or readiness for these predetermined concepts and skills in their practice in learning English. II. The Features of Grammar Teaching in Middle School2.1 Conditions of Grammar TeachingThere are two kinds of wrong and unfair thoughts. One of them is: Most teachers think grammar as a fixed set of word forms and rules of usage. They associate "good" grammar with the prestige forms of the language, that is, those used in writing and in formal oral presentations; and "bad" or "no" grammar with the language used in everyday conversation or used by speakers of no prestige forms. Language teachers who adopt this view focus on a set of forms and rules in teaching. So they will teach grammar by explaining the forms and rules and drilling students on them directly. This phenomena is very common in high schools English teaching, and that will result in bored and disaffected students who can produce correct forms on exercises and tests, but consistently make errors when they try to use the language in context. The other one is: Compared with the first one, other language teachers, influenced by recent theories about language learning and language acquisition, tend not to teach grammar at all. They belittle the role of the grammar and forget English is our the second language, believing that children can acquire grammar kownledge as they do in their first or native language without overt grammar instruction. They assume that students will absorb grammar rules as they hear, read, and use the language in communication activities. This approach does not allow students to use grammar as one of the major tools they have as learners.2.2 The Traditional Method of Grammar TeachingIn 1992 the State Education Development Commission (SEDC) introduced a functional syllabus that set the goal of communicative teaching and lists a set of communicative functions to be taught. In the same year, in cooperation with the publisher Longman, the SEDC published a new textbook series for communicative teaching. The syllabus and the textbooks required teachers to teach English language communicatively in classrooms. The movement toward CLT was not accidental. It came from an existing educational problem that needed to be solved: the widespread use of the traditional grammar-oriented method. During that period most teachers who focused on grammar and structure schools produced unsatisfactory teaching results. Students became almost structurally competent but communicatively incompetent. Faced with this backward situation, the SEDC felt an urgent need to make a change.In this method , grammar is likely to be learned by accumulating grammatical rules. Grammar courses using the tradition PPP(presentation-practice-production),or grammar teaching paradigm: to present abstract and discrete grammatical rules, to practice grammatical structure, to produce similar grammatical structures, are characterized by memorization, repetition and drill. But Rutherford suggested that grammatical rules can not be directly imparted to students because of its complexity in many rules. Language teachers who adopt this definition focus on grammar as a set of forms and rules. They teach grammar by explaining the forms and rules and then drilling students on them. This results in bored, disaffected students who can produce correct forms on exercises and tests, but constantly make errors when they try to use the language in context.Sharwood-Smith(1981:161)states: “ the discover of regularities in the language, whether bindle intuitive or conscious, or coming in between these two extremes, will always be self-discovery. The question is to what extent that discover is guided by the teacher. The guidance, where consciousness-raising is involved, can be more or less direct and explicit. The traditional grammar teaching methods were always accompanied by remembering thousands of memorizing endless and unusable grammar rules.III. Techniques for Grammar Teaching3.1 New Method “Awareness-raising ”in Grammar TeachingThe widespread use of the traditional grammar-oriented method produced unsatisfactory teaching results. Students became almost "structurally competent but communicatively incompetent". Faced with this backward situation, the SEDC felt an urgent need to make a change.Van Lier(1995:xi)write “Language Awareness can be defined as an understanding of the human faculty of language and its role in thinking, learning and social life.”Borg(1994)also points out that LA has been thought to mean a revision to the past unsuccessful and inappropriate practices in language teaching, and a response to notoriously dismal achievements in language learning. “the development of learners is natural consequence of the proper exploration of students ability and their attention to the nature and functions of language.(Carter 1993)”Accordingly, Mccarthy and Carter(1995)advocate Awareness-raising grammar teaching paradigm III(Illustration-interaction-induction). It means: teacher firstly provide a lot of language data to most students; then the teaching is operated through interaction(teacher-students: students-students);finally students formulate grammatical rules themselves.Awareness-raising approach in grammar teaching advocates inductive process of learning, no