The Importance of Teaching Grammar in the Middle School
四川雅安市汉源县第二中学
张蓉
Abstract: In the recent decades, educators emphasize Communication Teaching,
ignoring grammar teaching. This paper will show that teaching grammar is very
important. Teaching grammar is of great value. So we should know the reasons why we should
teach grammar, and know the ways how to teach grammar.
Key words: grammar, method, teaching, inductive, deductive
In the 19th century, some famous linguistics such as Gouin tried to build a
methodology around observation of child language learning. They advocated a
“natural” method. It is that teachers should make attempts to make students learn
second language more like first language. “Rather than using analytical procedures
that focus on explanation of grammar rules in classroom teaching, teachers must
encourage direct and spontaneous use of the foreign language in the classroom.
Learners would then be able to induce rules if grammar.” (Richards &Rodgers 2000 :
9) . This method is called the Direct Method. I think this method which is not allowed
to teach grammar is absolute in teaching English. Teaching grammar systemically is
very important in English study, especially in teaching Junior & Senior students.
I. the reasons of teaching grammar
“Grammar is a system of rules governing the conventional arrangement and
relationship of words in a sentence ” (Brown 2001: 34). So, if we want to grasp
language and use it well, we need have a good knowledge of grammar except
vocabulary. We study English in order to use it to communicate with others, for
example, cultural transmission from generation to generation, the spread of commerce
throughout the world. Even though some people think grammar is no longer needed in
a CLT(Communication Language Teaching) framework, “grammatical competence
occupies a prominent position as a major competence of communicative competence.
Organizational competence is an intricate, complex array of rules, some of which
govern the sentence (grammar), while others govern how we string sentences together
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(discourse). Without the structure that organizational constraints impose on our
communicative attempts, our language would simply be chaos.”(Brown 2001:348)
Grammatical competence is necessary for us to communicate with each other
successfully. “It gives us the form or the structures of language themselves (Brown
2001: 348). So we should doubt the prominence of grammar as an organizational
framework within which communication operates. “Historically, grammar has been
centered. But in recent decades, a few extremists have advocated no teaching of
grammar whatsoever” (Brown 2001: 349). But the view is wrong.
In the last decades, some people have advocated CLT. They think that in English
teaching, teachers only need to teach the learners use language to talk freely, not to
teach them grammar rules. In exams, teachers only need to test the students’ abilities
of using language, such as listening, reading and writing, without testing the students’
abilities of grasping learners can’t use English correctly. They may write sentences
without subject, predicate, not know how to use the infinitives, present or past
participle. When I correct my students’ compositions, I noticed that some sentences
that they wrote as following:
I name are Li Ping. (My name is Li Ping.)
His is my father. ( He is my father. )
There have a lot of homework to do it. ( There are a lot of work to do.)
I have a pen which being given by my father in a birthday present.
( I have a pen which is given by my father as a birthday present.)
and so on.
The learners made these mistakes, because the recent years we advocate CLT,
which ask the teachers not to teach grammar. They think that students can acquire the
language by communicating with each other, which leads students to overlooking
grammar’s grasp. They pay less attention to the grammar, so they knew so little about
phonology, morphology and syntax that they made a lot of mistakes in their spoken
and written English and can’t express themselves clearly. The fact tells us that
teaching grammar is so important that we must focus on it.
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II. The ways to teach grammar
1. Grammar should be presented inductively and deductively.
We should teach grammars inductively and deductively according to the
students’ cognitive characteristics. An inductive approach is that the learners are
left to discover or induce rules and generalizations on their own by practicing
various language forms while a deductive approach is that the teacher or textbook
gives a rule/ generalization and let the learners practice various instances of
language according to the rules. These two approaches should be contrasted with
each other even though an inductive approach is currently popular with teachers.
The reason why an inductive approach is advocated is:
“ ( a ) it is more in helping with natural language acquisition ( where rules are
absorbed subconsciously with little or no conscious focus.)
( b ) it conforms more easily to the concept of interlanguage development in
which learners progress through possible stages of rule acquisition.
( c ) it allows students to get a communicative “ feel ” for some aspect of
language before getting possibly overwhelmed by grammatical explanations, and
( d ) it builds more intrinsic motivation by allowing students to discover rules
rather than being told them.” (Brown 2001: 351 )
But the most appropriate way is to use both of them. Sometimes we need give
learners grammar rules and let them practice sentence patterns by using the rules.
In the middle and late 20th century, this method is very successful and train many
English successors, for example English 900 is a useful textbook, from which
many students benefit.
2. Grammar should be taught in different ways.
Grasping grammar is very difficult, so teachers should use different ways to
make them to learn it well. We can let learners discover the grammatical forms by
their own in a context and then give them a grammar lesson to sum up the rules and
practice to consolidate them. For example , when I teach the attributive clauses, firstly,
I let them read the text and pay more attention to the complex sentences that contain
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“ which, that, where, when and why” introducing another sentence. Secondly, let them
discover that all these words proceeding nouns or pronouns which are called
antecedent that can be subjects, objects , adverbials of times, places or reasons. After
they have enough cognition about the structures of these complex sentences, I tell
them this kind of sentence called the Attributive Clause. Although it’s a sentence, it
modifies the antecedent
which can be subject, object, adverb in the clause. Last I
give a grammar lesson focusing on the Attributive Clause to make them understand
the structure deeply. For example I write some sentences on the blackboard and make
them fill in the blanks using the relative pronouns or adverbs. Or I write some simple
sentences on the blackboard and ask them to combine two sentences into one complex
sentence, and so on. In this way they can understand this structure better. So in my
opinion it is necessary to teach grammar separately.
To sum up, in the recent decades, although many educators have advocated the
CLT approach , which makes the learners learn English in the situation and emphasize
the roles of communication without grammar teaching. The fact tells us it’s wrong.
We should focus on the students communication abilities, meanwhile we should give
a grammar lesson in order to make the students use English correctly and freely.
Work cited:
1. H. Douglas Brown, Teaching by Principles: An Interactive Approach
to Language Pedagogy, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and
Research Press. 2001
2. Richards, Jack C & Rodgers, Theodore S. Approaches and Methods in
Language Teaching, Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and
Research Press. 2000
3. 戴炜栋，何兆熊, 新编简明英语语言学教程，上海：上海外语教育
出版社。2002
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