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2.1.1 The approaches of grammar teaching abroad
In traditional grammar teaching, grammar is usually presented directly by the teacher but not taught together with context in junior high school. Traditionally, this kind of grammar teaching method can help students remember the grammar, but it’s mechanical and most students cannot handle it flexibly in communication.
Traditional structure-based grammar teaching had many problems, Long(1991) proposed “focus on form”, which focused on drawing student's attention to grammatical forms in the context. We can achieve “focus on form” in different ways. This approach is learner-centered and students will master the grammar unconsciously, so it’s relatively effective for grammar teaching.
During the last decade, plenty of proposals have been put forward to address second language teaching. The author reviews some researches on how to teach English grammar by foreign scholars: collaborative output tasks, communicative tasks and discourse-based grammar teaching.
Swain put forward collaborative tasks as a way to teach grammar. She inspires learners to make sentences with the second language and it’s far beyond their current language level. The learners may discover the form-meaning mapping when they make sentences that are beyond their current language level. And Swain thinks that collaboration plays an important role in learning second language. So, group work is a good way to teach English grammar based on this approach.
Communicative tasks focus on meaning and it’s widely used in second language teaching. Nunan (1989:10) defined communicative tasks as “a piece of classroom work which involves learners in comprehending, manipulating, producing, or interacting in the target language while their attention is principally focused on meaning rather than on form”. According to this approach, when students do the tasks, they will pay attention to grammar items unconsciously.
Many people attached great importance to discourse-based grammar teaching. Based on this approach, learners can build the form-meaning mapping by means of many examples provided in the discourse. And they can also learn the target grammar items. Celce-Murcia and Olshtain (2000) advocate the end of sentence-based approach to teach grammar and grammar teaching need both top-down (discourse-analytic) and bottom-up approach(syntax-analytic)(Nassaji, 2002). When teaching grammar items, teachers should pay attention to the syntactic and pragmatic functions, which is ignored by scholars using other approaches.
Having looked at these three approaches above, the author summarize two important items: the one is teachers should use different kinds of activities to encourage students to notice grammar items. The other is teachers should provide students with more opportunities to practice and express their ideas (output).
2.1.2 The approaches of grammar teaching in China
The grammar translation method has dominated English grammar teaching before the “Cultural Revolution” in China for several decades. The grammar syllabus is an explicit presentation of the rule and the exercises mainly involve translation between the foreign language and the mother tongue. It lays an excessive emphasis on the structures of language. However, it ignores the significance of learning language.
The foreign language teaching was in a bad condition and it didn’t come to life until the Audio-lingual method appeared in China. This method pays much more attention to listening and speaking, but it neglects grammatical explanation. As a result, this method just had a small impact on English grammar teaching in China.
Communicative approach appeared in China in the late 1970s. This approach claims that the final goal of learning language is communication, and grammar is just a part of language and a means towards communication. Communicative approach highlights that learners can communicate with others fluently using the foreign language, but it is not just to master grammatical knowledge. The actual use of language in communication is more important than remember the abstract language knowledge. But this approach attaches too much importance to oral language while ignoring other factors of language such as listening, speaking, reading and writing. In fact, we can make use of them to make learners notice grammar items, too.