Teaching Grammar to Primary Students: Comparing the Communicative and Grammar-Translation Methods

The choice of an effective method of teaching grammar is still a relevant issue in pedagogy. Nowadays, there are many opinions and methods that include different ways of teaching students. One of the most popular is grammar-translation, which is based on outdated principles of language acquisition by explicit methods. Despite this fact it continues to be used by teachers at school. One of the most widely used is the communicative approach, which is aimed directly at acquisition the language by communication. In this field are many studies related to the selection the most appropriate method. The purpose of this study is to identify the most efficient approach to teaching grammar in primary school. The first part of thesis deals with theoretical aspects of teaching grammar to primary school students in foreign language lessons, including an overview of the main stages and features of foreign language teaching. The characteristic of communicative and grammatical-translation approaches in teaching grammar is given in this chapter. In the second part we conduct an experiment involving series of lessons based on the grammar-translation method, and a series of lessons using the communicative method. Furthermore, we employ a qualitative and quantitative analysis of how these methods affect the acquisition of grammatical knowledge on students. Also, it provides an assessment of the effectiveness of the comparative experiment and recommendations. The results show that the communicative approach to teaching grammar is more effective than the grammar-translation approach and meets all the goals of learning a foreign language in primary school; the grammar-translation approach in teaching grammar helps to structure the studied grammatical material, but does not develop communication skills. Accordingly, the combination of communicative and grammar-translation approaches in foreign language lessons in primary school will help to structure grammatical skills and simultaneously develop communication skills. This research can contribute to improving the effectiveness of the process of teaching a foreign language in primary schools. Also, this can help solve some problems and difficulties that arise with the acquisition of grammar. Keywords: grammar teaching, communicative approach, grammar-translation method, second language acquisition