Teaching grammar to High school students through communicative tasks a quasi-experimental study

Teaching grammar to High school students through communicative tasks a quasi-experimental study Triệu Thị Giang Trường Đại học Ngoại Ngữ Luận văn ThS.. Nowadays, English teaching has

Teaching grammar to High school students through communicative tasks a

quasi-experimental study

Triệu Thị Giang

Trường Đại học Ngoại Ngữ Luận văn ThS Chuyên ngành: English Linguistics; Mã số: 60 22 15

Người hướng dẫn: M.A Lê Văn Canh

Năm bảo vệ: 2010

Keywords: Tiếng Anh; Ngữ pháp. Phương pháp giảng dạy; Phổ thông trung học

Content:

CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1.1 Rationale

Together with the development of society, English has been used as a tool for communication among nonnative speakers More than a half of one billion English speakers

of the world learn English as a second language More and more people have to learn English

in nearly every field Learners have different reasons why they study English, and this has a great influence on their motivation of learning English At upper secondary schools, English has become a compulsory subject in the state examination and it is one of three subjects for some universities’ entrance exam Besides the aim of passing their exams and getting some further studies for their future life Therefore, there is a must to equip learners with a good learning method as well as teachers with new, good and interesting teaching methods in order

to attract learners and arouse their interest to help them get effective result While the traditional approach to grammar has been strongly criticized as being infective

Nowadays, English teaching has improved in method in the light of the communicative, learner-centered which is adaptable to required objectives and give students many opportunities to communicate in English According to Prabhu, who developed the idea of getting learners to acquire English through tasks in 1980s in India, “learners may learn more effectively when their minds are focused on tasks, rather than on the language they are using.” Furthermore, TGTCT has been promoted (Nunan, 1992) And because of the features of task-based teaching approach, which widely promoted in English teaching nowadays, and adopted in teaching language skills in the textbook at upper secondary school

in Vietnam, is mentioned later I, myself, think that TBLT may have significance or may be effective in grammar teaching- the important aspect of language learning

In order to know whether or not the task-based teaching approach is possible in

grammar teaching And from these above reasons, I decided to choose “teaching grammar to high school students through communicative tasks” for my thesis of the MA course

1.2 Aims of the study

The aims of this study are to experiment teaching grammar through communicative tasks for grade 10 students To be more specific, the primary objectives of the study were set

as followed:

- To experiment teaching grammar through communicative task for grade 10 students and test its result

- To investigate the experimental students' attitudes towards teaching grammar through communicative task

1.3 Research hypothesis and questions

To achieve the aims and objectives, the study was designed to test the hypothesis:

Teaching grammar through communicative tasks is more effective to the development

of students' grammatical competence than the traditional approach which emphasizes the memorization of rules and decontextualized practice

In order to identify the research hypothesis would be accepted or would be rejected, the research questions were formulated and needed to be answered satisfactorily

1 Is students' grammaticality better as measured by their test scores than it is taught

in the traditional focus-on-forms methods?

2 What are the students' attitudes towards teaching grammar through communicative tasks after experimental period?

1.4 Method of the study

This study employed a quasi-experimental method in order to determine the causal relationship between teaching grammar through communicative tasks and the enhancement

of students' grammatical competence It is quasi-experimental, rather a true experimental because it did not randomize the samples Instead two intact groups of students were involved

in the study, one group being the control group and the other, the experimental group

1.5 Significance of the study

Grammar in the TIENG ANH textbook series for high schools is presented in a traditional way In other words, discrete-point grammatical items are presented usually with more than one grammatical items being presented in one Lesson Unit This means that a traditional approach to grammar, which focuses on decontextualized or sentence-based presentation and practice of grammar The study will give an answer to the question of whether it is practical to teach grammar through communicative tasks in the context of the high school in Viet Nam

1.6 Scope of the study

The study was designed to test the hypothesis that it is possible to teach grammar presented in the textbook following the Task-based model Because of the time constraint The researcher could just carry out an experiment upon a small sample of grade 10 students who were no-randomly assigned to a control class and an experimental class, (30 students per each) The pretest and posttest scores were used to measure both groups' English grammar knowledge before and after the trial period of first semester and half of the second semester

of the 2009-2010 academic year The post- program questionnaire was designed to get more feedback from experimental students The result of the questionnaire would give the researcher supplementary support for the conclusion drawing So that, the findings of the

research could reflect the effects of TGTCT on the subject in the context under consideration

1 7 Organization of the study

The study was divided into five main chapters, which are presented as followed: Chapter one presents an overview of the study in which the rationale, the purpose, the hypothesis and questions, research method, significance, aims as well as the organization of the study

Chapter two reviews the literature relevant to the study consisting of the role of grammar in FLL, approaches to grammar, Task-based language teaching, Task-based grammar teaching based on theoretical and practical evidence

Chapter three deals with a detailed description of the study consisting of the syllabus for grade 10 students, the subjects of the study, the rationale for using quasi-experimental study, research design, procedures, the tasks and the findings which concluding the comparison of the pretest and posttest of both control group and experimental group, the students' attitudes towards teaching grammar through communicate tasks The discussions of the findings are presented in this chapter

Chapter four points out the recommendations as well as some limitations of the research and conclusions of the study, and suggestions for further study

1.8 Summary

This chapter presents the rationale, the aims, the hypothesis to be tested and the research method used in this study Also the organization of the thesis is presented The next chapter reviews the literature

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