2020年英语语法教学的趣味性论文

英语语法教学的趣味性论文 Grammar is a set of rules for choosing words and putting words together to make sense. Every language has a set of grammar rules. It has been held that if a language is a building, the words are the building bricks and the grammar is the architects plan. Without a plan, there would not be any building. However, with the growing popularity of the municative language teaching approach, grammar is more and more neglected and grammar teaching is regarded as inherently “dull” or “old-fashioned”. Some teachers are even going to extremes by avoiding talking about grammar under the supposition that grammar teaching do no good to students municative petence. As a consequence, the grammatical knowledge is not timely consolidated, internalized and converted into a practical ability. There are some problems in grammar teaching, which are generalized as “five emphases” and “five neglects”, 1 that is: emphasizing instilling knowledge while neglecting practicing skills; emphasizing explaining in detail while neglecting exercising; emphasizing written exercises while neglecting oral practices; emphasizing the analyses of grammar while neglecting the usage of grammar; emphasizing the mastery of rules while neglecting knowing examples. It is because of these problems and difficulties that grammar teaching is so boring for both teachers and students. There are some features of grammar teaching in the class which is worth noticing.2 Grammar teaching should fit the students age, the class situation, and the content of teaching materials. 1) Try to satisfy the students desire of suess. For instance, aording to different levels of the students, teachers can teach them to sing English songs, read some interesting stories to them or talk about childrens programs with them. 2) In termsof “3-s” which is surprise, suspension and satisfaction, teachers can advance some enlightening questions to satisfy the students curiosity and to arouse their interest. 3) Teaching methods should be of variety and flexible. Listening, speaking, reading and writing should be developed harmoniously. 1) Emphasize municative usage, such as doing duty report, two minutes talk, free chat between students and the teacher, and so on. 2) Insist on elaborate explaining and doing more exercises, which requires the teacher to give two thirds to three fourths of the class time to do exercises that should be designed aording to the difficulty gradation, and aording to their purposes. Try to avoid forgetting and try to consolidate the knowledge gradually. In other words, teaching materials should be arranged systematically and organizationally. The teacher should try to connect new knowledge with the old ones, increase repetition and enhance exercises to enhance positive transference and help students grasp knowledge and train their practical skill. In a word, such features make grammar teaching particular and important. In order to teach grammar suessfully, the following principles should be paid attention to and obeyed. The following principles should be showed in the class.3 Motive is the assurance of all teaching activities, including grammar teaching. Nowadays, since more and more students are not interested in grammar, it is more and more significant to motivate students. There are six points altogether in this principle. 1) Choose the topic that suits the students age, cognition and language learning. 2) Create the proper situation, and try to offer some ocular objects, such as pictures and slides. 3) Make grammar exercises open ended in answers which allow students to talk freely and arouse their interest. 4) Form and meaning are bined. Meaning should be the core of exercises, which can be designed with an information gap to let students join in and get what they want to know. 5) Personality should be embodied fully, which help students to carry on the real exchange. 6) The activities should be more challenging and make students moderately nervous, thus students will get the joy of suess. It is made up of six points as well. 1) The aim of the grammar teaching activities should be clear. 2) Try to increase students participation in pair work or group work. 3) Make sure the efficiency of practices, which means to make sure students are able to use the new grammar rules properly and make them have a sense of suess and satisfaction after the teacher correcting their faults. 4) Increase the kinds of activities. The variety of activities is the condiment of the studying and teaching. Sincethere are students of different levels, the activities in the class should be different. 5) Preparation before exercises requires that there must be presentation and explanation. After students have a clear idea about the taught grammar rule, they can enter into grammar practicing. 6) Class evaluation. There is a grammar test at the end of the class. The vitality of teaching activities in the class lies in the changing of teaching activities. The teacher should create fertile activities in terms of students situation. It shows that teaching should fit every student. So implicit teaching and dominant teaching, inductive method and deductive method, controlling, semi-controlling and municative practice should be united. This tells that teaching should follow the procedure of presenting, explaining and developing, otherwise, its effect will be damaged. Language serves munication, and the real language ability is developed in the process of municating. So munication should also be embodied in grammar teaching. Language ability is the basis of municative ability. And learning grammar is not the aim but the way of learning language. Teaching does not mean just teaching grammar, neither does language learning. In a word, with the new curricular reform, the aim of grammar teaching also changes. Grammar teaching is aimed to stress the marrow of grammar by nimble teaching designs, and to make grammar class alive through creating fertile situations, thus to help students transfer the isolated and scrap language points to apply language quickly. So the new or useful methodologies should fit the features, suit the principles and display the aim. Aording to the differences of methods of introducing the structure, there are implicit ways, such as the inductive method, and explicit ways, such as the deductive method. Aording to the differences of teaching aims, there are municative approach, situational method and task-based method, which are aimed at developing students municative ability. And all these methods can be adopted to make grammar teaching vivid and interesting. In the inductive method, the teacher induces students to realize grammar rules without any form of explicit explanation. It is believed that the rules will bee evident if students are given enough appropriate examples. For instance, the teacher wants to introduce parative adjectives to a class of low-level students, she first shows a picture of a tall, thin girl labeled Mary, saying “Mary is tall”. She shows a second picture of an even taller, thinner girl labeled Ann, saying “Ann is tall”. The teacher then puts the two pictures side by side with each other and says: “Mary is tall and Ann is tall, too. But Annis taller than Mary”. The teacher can do the same for “thin” and introduce more pictures, or objects and adjectives: long, short, big, small and so on. After several examples, students will understand the structure of the parative adjectives. The target sentence is “Ann is taller than Mary”. Then students produce more sentences using the pattern “X is -er than Y”.4 The teacher may check whether students have grasped the meaning of the structure by asking some conceptual questions, then give them further practices. In order to present the two forms “this is” and “these are”, the teacher will first hold up a book, saying “This is a book.” He or She will do the same showing other objects. Then the teacher holds up several books and says “These are books.” After several similar examples, it is hoped students will understand “these are” is used with plural forms of nouns. Then students are invited to apply the newly learned structure to produce sentences with given visual aids or verbal prompts. The teacher tries to say nothing except to correct when necessary. Then the teacher may elicit the grammar rule from the students.5 The deductive method relies on reasoning, analyzing and paring. In the deductive classroom, the teacher gives a grammatical explanation or rule first, and then ask them to use the rule to do a set of exercises in order to understand the grammatical point and help them master the language item. One possible way of delivering such a lesson is as follows:6 (a) Present the structure and explain the “rule” in a way that involves the students. (b) Write up the language structure. (c) Set up some activities so that the students can practice the language structure in a meaningful context. For example, the teacher may use a role play, a discussion or a piece of writing to consolidate the language structure. When teaching the structure “used to do”, the teacher firstly presents it on the blackboard and explain its meaning and usage clearly. Then the teacher gives students some examples. After that, he or she invites students to do group work to make sentences using the structure. The group that makes the most examples will be the winner. Besides when presenting the future tense, the teacher presents the word “will” and do the same as the above. Then he or she can ask students to do a piece of writing to check their understanding. The title may be “my dream”. And read some good writings to the class next day. Among the methods for teaching grammar, the deductive method and the inductive method have been discussed and adopted most frequently. Obviously, the inductive method is more interesting. It is believed that the inductive method is more effective in which students discover the grammar rules themselves while engaged in language use. This is especially true with grammatical regularities which areeasily perceived, understood and applied. However, it is a good idea to bine both methods, which avoids the bad influences of the traditional infusing method and can motivate students. Nowadays, the teacher bine the two methods more and more. He or She usually uses the inductive method firstly and then the deductive method, especially when teaching some more difficult grammar points. For example, when teaching the structure “If I were, I would”, the teacher may make sentences like this: “If I were a bird, I would be kept in a hutch.” “If I were a millionaire, I would go around the world.” The more, the better. Then the teacher asks students to find out the similarities of the sentences and encourage them to guess its meaning or features. After that, the teacher can make further explanations on the basis of students understanding. And to check if they have grasped the structure, the teacher can invite students to do pair work. The students discuss with their partner and make a dialog. Finally, the teacher asks several pairs to act out and do some ments. Similarly, subjunctive mood can be taught in this way. Communicative approach, which is aimed at developing students practical municative ability, emphasizes how to use the right municative context in the process of language study, and holds that language study should meet the students needs of exchanging and transferring information in their real life and work. So the core of it is “using language to learn and learn to use language”. In municative class, students are considered as the main role. The teacher organizes all kinds of real and vivid activities to make teacher-student and student-student exchanges, then help students transfer the grammar knowledge into their skill of applying language. When teaching the article, the teacher can draw a picture and ask students to describe the picture, on which there is a book on the table, there is a bed in the room, and so on. And the two pictures are of few differences. One of them can ask the following questions: Is there a girl in your picture? Or is there a mirror in it? Also, two students can have different information to exchange. One of them has a picture with “carrot, horse, rose, and tomato” and the other has another picture of “animal, flower, fruit and vegetable”. Then they exchange the information by asking and answering some questions. So they can make a dialogue like this: A: What is a carrot? B: It is a vegetable.7 Lastly, one student has a picture and he will ask his partner to set the things aording to the picture. e.g. Put the pen on the book beside the bag. All these methods can motivate students, and also develop their municative skills. The grammar can also be learned and taught in the form of poems or songs. Because such poems or songs are always relaxing, lively and fortable to read, and are easy to remember. Students can learn and master the pattern “have done” by reading the following songs: The Beaches of Mexico Have you ever seen the beaches of Mexico? Have you ever walked the streets of San Juan? Have you ever been to Haiti? Ive sure been in pain. Ive sure been in love. Id do it all again. 8 After introducing subjunctive mood, the teacher can offer a poem to help students understand the mood as follows: If All Were One If all the seas were one sea, what a great sea that would be! If all the trees were one tree, what a great tree that would be! If all the axes were one axe, what a great axe that would be! If all the men were one man, what a great man that would be! If the great man took the great axe, and cut down the great tree. And let it fall into the great sea, what a great splash that would be! It is believed that such kind of teaching would be effective because it would make the class lively and students excited. Communicative approach requires that the teacher should connect grammar teaching with practice and munication consciously to offer an environment for students to use the grammar through listening, speaking, reading and writing. For example, after introducing the article, the teacher can not only design some blank-filling exercises but also organize the following paragraph: Once there lived an old woman. She had a very beautiful cat. One day she lost her cat. She looked for it everywhere but couldnt find it. She was very disappointed. One evening she saw a cat lying by the roadside almost dying. She was very happy and bought it home.9 Then the teacher asks students to read the paragraph quickly by themselves and answer the questions as follows: 1) Does the article tell us if the old woman found her own cat? 2) How do you know? If the students want to understand the paragraph and answer the questions correctly, they must know the meaning of “a”. In this way, the students can master the usage of the article by reading the paragraph, and understand the whole paragraph by knowing the rule of using the article as well, which can help them grasp the usage of the article further. So from what have been discussed, it is easily found that the municative approach assumes that the purpose of language teaching is to manipulate the structures of the foreign language and how to use the grammar rules. While teaching grammar, the teacher should try to provide students with many opportunities to use the language for municative purpose, develop students ability to participate in munication through language rather than their perfect mastery of individual structures. By adopting municative approach, the classroom atmosphere is relaxing and lively. The teacher is no longer dominant but an organizer, helper and participant while students are no longer “ignorant audience” and passive learners, but actively involved in the class. They are not only learning the grammatical rules but also practicing their speaking, listening and reading, thus their municative ability will be greatly improved. “Situation” is the oasion where the target language is practiced. The right situation can help students understand and apply language suitably. The teacher should utilize the real environment or create lifelike situation to teach grammar, which includes objects, real language surroundings, postures, non-language ways, multimedia, pictures, examples and so on. It is believed that the classroom is the most economical and convenient “teaching tool”. There are students, a teacher, doors, windows, walls, blackboards, desks and lights, which have formed a special relationship to be used in grammatical class. For example, when teaching “both” and “neither”, the teacher can ask two boys to stand up and introduce them: This is Li Lei and this is Wang Tao. Li Lei is a boy and Wang Tao is a boy, too. They are both boys. / Both of them are boys. Li Lei isnt a girl. Wang Tao isnt a girl, either. Neither of them is a girl. The teacher can write down the sentences that include “bot