Abstract: This paper attempts to elaborate the importance of grammar teaching at college through the four linguistic skills: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. The nature of grammar determines the significance of grammar teaching. This paper shows the importance of grammar teaching from its relationship with listening, speaking, reading and writing.
Key words: grammar； grammar teaching；importance
Ⅰ. Introduction
A language is made up of phonetics, vocabulary and grammar. Without grammar, there would be no language. However, with the development of communicative approach, people lay emphasis on cultivating students’ communicative competence and neglect the importance of grammar teaching at college. Marianne Celce-Murcia says “Noticeable and convincing proof shows teaching without grammar can only lead to cripple in foreign language whether it is based on comprehension or on communication. Students can’t make progress if surpassing the stage”[1]. Therefore, grammar teaching plays an important role in improving the level of college English teaching.
Ⅱ. The importance of grammar teaching at college
1. Grammar and listening
Listening as a skill may be extremely similar to reading, but the text the listener has to deal with is considerably different from the written one. Obviously, a listener cannot look at what he is trying to hear, and he can only listen to it. In order to get messages from the listening material correctly, the listener must master enough grammatical knowledge besides other linguistic knowledge. Take the following dialogue as an example A:I really enjoyed myself today, How about you? B: So did I. If the listener A does not understand what the auxiliary “did” means and the “so” pattern, he may not get enough messages from B, and their communication between them may end up. Grammar is essential for a correct understanding of the speaker’s meanings especially when the listener is elemental.
2. Grammar and speaking
As a productive skill, speaking is often combined with listening for use. “A speaker has a great range of expressive possibilities at his command. Apart from the actual words he uses, he can vary his intonation and stress which helps him to show which parts of what he is saying are more or less important, or whether, for example, he wishes to be taken seriously”.[2] If speaking occurs in a conversation, the speaker may use some facial expression, gesture and body posture to help to convey his message. But for a speech maker, he may not be asked for clarification, so he has to pay attention to grammar and style used in his speech. Only correct grammatical knowledge and adequate style can make the listeners understand what the speaker means. By paying attention to grammar, the students will know how to use the correct tense to talk about what happens and facilitate the communication. 3. Grammar and reading
Reading is an exercise dominated by the eyes and the brain. It is also a receptive skill just like listening. The purposes of reading like these:1) scanning; 2) skimming; 3) thorough comprehension or critical reading. In order to achieve this purpose, the reader must master some linguistic knowledge and reading strategies. Generally, it is also up to the reader to decide how fast he wants to read a text. The reader’s grammatical competence usually influences the reading speed, the reading result and understanding effect. If the reader is lacking of grammatical competence, he will meet with many blocks during the reading process such as misunderstanding the meaning of the sentence, isolating the discourse of the text and getting little information from reading, and he will fail to achieve the reading aim.
4. Grammar and writing
In order to make readers understand what has been written, the writer usually pays much attention to the use of grammatical and stylistic techniques for focusing attention on main points. When writing a composition, the students know that they have to write correct sentences first so as to get their minds understand. This composition is usually made up of many sentences. Good sentences are the essence of good writing. But how do we define good sentences? One way to define a good sentence is to describe its parts or its grammar. Of course, looking only at sentence in your piece of writing is insufficient, unless you treat each sentence in isolation. You need to consider not only grammar but also style. When we evaluate a sentence, we first focus on grammar and then on style especially in the elementary level of writing though a good sentence in grammar may not be a good sentence in style. Therefore, in the process of writing teaching, it is necessary for teachers to emphasize grammatical knowledge.
Ⅲ. Conclusion
With the urgent requirement of communicative competence in modern society, the social communicative function is overemphasized in language teaching classroom. This paper states that grammar is the theoretical basis of foreign language teaching. Therefore, at present, in order to cultivate the communicative competence, college teachers should pay enough attention to English grammar, and makes great effort to improve the efficiency of grammar teaching. Certainly, grammar teaching is only a means, and not the purpose, so we should master the position of grammar teaching in the whole English teaching, and know about its function which should not be exaggerated or be underrated. This is the correct attitude to grammar teaching.
References
[1] Celce-Murcia, M. 1985. “Making informed decisions about the role of grammar in language teaching”. TESOL, NEWSLETTER, Vol, XLX No,1:20
[2] Harmer, J. 1983. The Practice of English Language Teaching. London: Longman Group Ltd
[3] Harmer, J. 1983. The Practice of English Language Teaching. London: Longman Group Ltd
作者简介：孙丽伟，女 （1982- ）吉林省吉林市人，吉林农业科技学院外语学院助教，研究方向：外國语言学。
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