The importance of English grammar teaching

The importance of English grammar teaching

The view of grammar from Philip Kerr is that grammar is at the center of language learning. (Kerr, 2002. qtd. in Willis J. & Willis D.) . When learning a language, if not knowing the internal rules of the language, learners would definitely have trouble in conveying and expressing his ideas and attention. The internal rules here refer to grammar. Therefore, grammar teaching is imperative to language learners for it enhances learner proficiency and accuracy and facilitates the internalization of its syntactic system (Hinkel and Fotos, 2002:10). That is to say, we should learn grammar if we want to have a good command of a certain language.

However, traditional teaching methods are largely expository and the teaching process is teacher-dominated (Biggs, 1996b). some teachers always teach grammar in a mechanical way. “show (grammar rules) + drill (sentence structures)”. What’s more, they are likely to present and explain all the rules of a certain grammar item at one time, and then assign some corresponding exercise for consolidation. Yet, the practice is often mechanical in the form of multiple choices. And little attention is paid to the meaning as well as the application in real communication. Students have to learn grammar by memorization. This way of grammar teaching is not effective as expected though a large quantity of efforts in the teaching process has been taken. It’s proved to be obsolete, which no longer meets the requirement of the new situation and the reform and opening-up policy.

New concepts are needed to change this kind of situation. That’s why how to

carry out the English grammar teaching more effectively has been the hot and common topic for English teachers for a long time. Teachers find it difficult to present or explain a foreign-language grammatical structure to students in a direct way. Difficulties also appear in the issue about how to instruct students to learn the meaning of grammar and how to apply them to practice, not only for exercise but also for other real uses. Then comes the question of how to teach grammar in an interesting and acceptable way.

The importance of grammar can be seen from its two characteristics: the interdisciplinary quality and the applied quality. Foreign language teaching, especially grammar teaching, is an interdisciplinary discipline in that it not only draws upon theories from a single science, but from several sciences such as sociology and psychology. “Therefore, its application is also interdisciplinary. It applies psycholinguistics or sociolinguistics, etc. to the teaching and learning of language\" (Halliday, 1994). Grammar is an applied division. Learning English well within a few years cannot be achieved without learning basic grammatical knowledge although learning grammatical knowledge cannot be equal to language learning.

Then, how to improve the grammar teaching

3.1 Teaching grammar in context

3.4 Using Communicative approach to bring out the rules of grammar naturally