Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Research background
Chinese students learn English without English–speaking environment. In Englishclasses, teachers tend to focus on existing knowledge of the disseminate books, includes therecitation of the words, dialogues and explanation of the text, and often ignore the lack ofsyntactic structure in the textbook. Even some teachers teach grammar in class, the teacherwill explain the syntax rules separately, give examples and let the students do some exercise.This approach of learning grammar by mastering the grammar rules and memorizing theirexceptions has been proved uninterested and ineffective. In current English teaching in China,there are several teaching approaches which have been being used in English classes. Afterthe introduction of audio-lingual approach and communicative approach to China, Englishlistening and speaking have been emphasized and grammar has been weakened in primaryand middle schools. Vocational school students in China come from junior middle schools,and many of them are underachievers when they are in middle school. Most of them havepoor English and it is difficult for them to further their English study. Based on my personalexperience on English teaching in vocational schools, it can be found that the English level ofvocational school students is generally not high, and one of the major obstacles is from theirpoor grammar knowledge.
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1.2 Significance of the research
Noam Chomsky put forward “Transformational Grammar” theory and the cognitivepsychologist, Jean Piaget proposes “genetic epistemology”. Chomsky proved that language isentirely innate and discovered a "universal grammar”. They believe that people were bornwith English talent and language learning is a mental process. The cognitive approach offoreign language teaching focuses on sentence structure of the language. Among journals orpapers published in recent years, most of the previous studies were about task-based foreignlanguage grammar teaching. There are few studies about application of cognitive approach onforeign language grammar teaching. In domestic studies, Cognitive English GrammarTeaching -- on College independent grammar teaching for English major students (HuangHebin) is about application of cognitive approach on English Grammar teaching for collegeEnglish major students. Empirical research on this issue in vocational schools is particularlyless. So it is necessary to do the current experimental studies on this topic.The study will help English teachers know about some characteristics of the vocationalschool students and find a better way to teach English grammar. It will also guide the studentsto learn English effectively. It tries to enable both the teachers and students to become awareof the importance of applying cognitive theories in teaching and learning a foreign language.The study will also provide a theoretical guidance and empirical examples of English grammar teaching.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Cognitive theory
In l960s, the achievements made in psychology and cognitive sciences have broughtabout the existence of cognitive psychology. Cognitive psychology is the psychologicalscience studying the processes which underlie thinking. This covers a broad range of researchdomains, examining questions about the workings of memory, attention, perce，英语论文题目，英语论文
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