The misunderstanding of grammar teaching method

The British linguist H.G Widdowson once pointed out that the speech activity has two levels, one is to regard listening, speaking, reading and writing as a means by which the students can grasp the rules of the language after repeated practices. The other is to regard listening, speaking, reading and writing as the ultimate purpose of teaching by which the students can use the language in communication in reality.
Some teachers believe that it is good to limit their students only in doing something like improving the communicative competence of their students. They pay little attention to the grammatical structure of their students’ speaking. This is only one side of the coin. We all know that grammar is not only the core of a language, but a theoretical tool in regulating language. Those above- mentioned teachers ignore this idea; they pay their attentions only to the communicative function of the language and reject grammar. If a teacher teaches the students in communicative training blindly and fails to help them to summarize the characteristics of the sentence and compare it with other new sentences at proper time, the result will surely be that the students can’t fully understand the new sentence and mistakes are unavoidable when they use it.
Some teachers think it is enough to explain knowledge and drill sentences because they are always worried that their students can’t master the new knowledge. They even suspect the role of CLT, and mistakenly believe that the CLT is only used for strengthening the students’ oral expression, and not for improving their grammar ability. Their students, therefore, can only have linguistic ability and are unable to have sociolinguistic ability. 
They can’t put the knowledge into practice well in their daily life. Actually speaking, the purpose of CLT is to enhance not only the sociolinguistic ability but also the linguistic ability of the students. So the ideas of the above-mentioned teachers are both one-sided. They regard grammar teaching as conflicting with communicative activities. These two groups of teachers are unable to understand that both ideas are closely related to each other, and they see only one side of the coin instead of two and inevitably go to extremes.

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