Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Research background
Grammar is often regarded as the organizational rules and structural forms oflanguage. It is also a series of rules that make other people involved understand whilecommunicating. Therefore, grammar determines the accuracy and fluency ofcommunication, and serves as the foundation of it. Meanwhile, grammaticalcompetence is an essential part of English language competence as well, which isclosely related with language performance such as listening, speaking, writing andetc.In recent decades, “should grammar be taught” has been a controversial topic.Krashen (1981) claims that the grammatical knowledge learned consciously cannot beturned into the unconscious language ability. Therefore, he supports to acquiregrammar under natural environment rather than formal learning. His opinion issupported by some scholars, such as Skehan (1988), Dekeyser (1998), they all believethat formal instruction can only make students get grammatical knowledge rather thanthe ability of using them correctly. However, current research on second languageacquisition makes people reconsider the function of grammar instruction. Recently,many empirical studies based on formal instruction verify that formal grammarteaching could facilitate language learning (Ellis, 1997; Larsen-Freeman & Long,1991; Long, 1983). Larson-Freeman & Long (1991) indicate that grammar teachingcannot change the route but can motivate and facilitate the rate of learning. Brieflyspeaking, formal instruction that may acts as an “acquisition facilitator” (Seliger, 1979)can speed up grammar learning especially under our EFL circumstance. Higgs andClifford (1982) state that unmonitored practice of inaccurate language could actuallycause fossilization by their teaching experience, and once learners acquire someungrammatical forms in their interlanguage that were extremely difficult to dislodge.This lead to the conclusion that it is beneficial to teach grammar in the classroom.
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1.2 The current situation of grammar teaching and grammar learning in Vocational Colleges
Generally speaking, the grammar teaching for English majors in VocationalColleges always lasts one semester in the first year, and there are about eight hours oflessons in a week.The basic requirement of English teaching in vocational Education (2017) issuedby the Ministry of Education indicates clearly that English teaching should emphasizeto lay a good foundation of basis language knowledge so to build students’ ability ofapplying it. As we know, such solid foundation about grammatical knowledge musthave a good impact on other aspects in English learning, for an instance,communicative competence, which is the essential goal of professional education.Hence, grammar teaching in Vocational Colleges plays an important role in languageteaching.From the perspective of students enrolled at Vocational Colleges, their generallanguage foundations are relatively poor and different on account of some actualreasons, let alone their grammatical foundation. As they are from different regions,their language foundation are various and imbalanced (Wu Xiaolong, 2017). Inaddition, students’ weak learning confidence and motivation are the other key factorsinfluencing grammar teaching there (Liao Fang, 2017). Consequently, they are hard toavoid lots of learning barriers with some wrong habit of learning in the later studies.Hu ，英语毕业论文，英语论文范文
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