Methods & Activities

         In history, grammar teaching has gone through a variety of teaching contents and approaches from the Grammar-Translation Method, the Direct Method, the Audio-Lingual Method, the Cognitive Method to the Communicative Approach, such as Grammar Consciousness Raising Approach, Interactional Feedback Approach, Textual Enhancement Teaching, Textual Teaching or Discourse-based Teaching Mode, Task-based Grammar Teaching, Interpretation-based Grammar Teaching, Output Tasks Communicative Teaching, Story-based Approach, Content-based Teaching, etc. (Nan, 2015). Pennington (2002) suggested a synthesis approach to grammatical pedagogy and focused 4C (Collocational, Constructive, Contextual and Contrastive). Richards and Reppen (2014) came up with twelve principles as the basis for a pedagogy that emphasizes acquiring learning how to use grammar in a text.

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          In China, Grammar-translation has traditionally ruled grammar teaching for a long time (Dai, 2011). In such a method, native language is used to elicit meaning and translation from the target language into the native language constitutes the main classroom activity (Larsen-Freeman, 2000). Richards & Rodgers (2001) observed that with the Grammar-translation method, learners have to memorize the grammatical forms and vocabulary of the target language which are deductively presented to them. This method may help the learners to obtain extensive knowledge of the grammatical rules, but they will have difficulties in using the language in unrehearsed communicative contexts (Hashemi and Daneshfar, 2018). To facilitate the learning process for students, Chinese EFL teachers have switched from using traditional ways of teaching English to adopting a variety of modern English teaching methods from the West (Rao, 2002). They adopted Dictogloss Mode, Integrating Grammar Instruction, Cognitive Grammar Teaching, Task-based Mode, Contest and Textual Grammar teaching, Content-based Approach, etc. (Nan, 2015).