How to teach English grammarAbstract: Throughout the process of high school English teaching, grammar teaching is the foundation which can help students improve their basic skills of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating. But a lot of students are poorly aware of the importance of grammar teaching. There are some principles of grammar. Firstly, the value of grammar in foreign language teaching is very important. Secondly, there are three ways of presenting grammar in the classroom. Finally,we should teach English grammar with new ideas.Key words: English, grammar teaching, grammar presenting, strategy. English grammar is the core of English language. Without grammar, English language cannot be well constructed.There is naturally Chinese grammar in the minds of Chinese students, and it's not easy to take in the grammar of a foreign language. But this difficulty must be overcome. If we cannot solve this difficulty, the foreign language we write, though it may be understandable, it will be Chinese style English.The value of grammar in foreign language teaching has been the focus of debate on: the role of grammar in language teaching; the methods in which grammar should be presented and practiced. Despite many different views about the role of grammar in language learning, the importance of grammar can’t be denied. The purpose of the task above isnot to seek definite conclusions about the value of grammar teaching, but rather to raise awareness of issues in grammar teaching.There are three ways of presenting grammar in the classroom. The first one is the deductive method, which relies on reasoning, analyzing and comparing. This method is often criticized because: a) it teaches grammar in an isolated way; b) little attention is paid to meaning; c) practice is often mechanical. However, this method is not without merit. The second one is the inductive method .The teacher provides learners with authentic language data and induces the learners to realize grammar rules without any form of explicit explanation. It is believed that the rules will become evident if the students are given enough appropriate examples. The last one is the guided discovery method which is similar to the inductive method in that the students are induced to discover rules by themselves but different in that the process of the discovery is carefully guided and assisted by the teacher and the rules are then elicit and taught explicitly. In the guided discovery method, students are presented with contextualized scenarios illustrating a specific structure.Presenting new grammatical items does not have to start with the teacher presenting and explaining. It can also start by providing a reading text or a listening text. For example, Ellis suggests the following procedures for teaching grammar using listening as input: Listening to comprehend; Listening to notice; Understanding the grammar point; Checking; Trying it out. In practice, learner variables and instructional variables need to be consideredwhen teachers decide which method to use in presenting a particular grammatical structure.As grammatical competence can’t be attained solely through exposure to the target language or meaningful input, there is a need for meaningful practice and communicative use of structure taught. It is widely believed that practice is of vital importance in the teaching and learning of grammar. Grammar practice is usually divided into two categories, mechanical practice and meaningful/communicative practice. Mechanical practice involves activities that are aimed at form accuracy. By doing mechanical practice, the students pay repeated attention a key element in a structure. Using prompts for practice has also proved to be an effective way of grammar practice. The prompts can be pictures, mimes, tables, charts or key words. Practice based on is usually considered as meaningful practice. For example, using picture prompts, using mimes or gesture as prompts, using information sheet as prompts, using key phrases or key words as prompts, using chained phrases for story telling, using created situations.Finally, it is important to note that grammar presentation is concerned with how to make the students understand or discover grammar rules. So if we want to learn well, we should pay more attention to grammar presentation and practice. It is not difficult to teach grammar only if we try your best do it.In a word, Grammar is the system of a language. People sometimes describe grammar as the “rules” of a language; but in fact no language has rules. If we u se the word “rules”, we suggest that somebody created the rules first and then spoke the language, like a new game. But languages did not start like that. Languages started by people making sounds which evolved into words, phrases and sentences. No commonly-spoken language is fixed. All languages change over time. What we call “grammar” is simply a reflection of a language at a particular time.Grammar Teaching and learning are very important in English study. For a long time, the education sectors who taught English grammar are not aware of this. Some people think that grammar is the rules which can not be expressed, but on the contrary the target language is usually acquired in subconscious as long as more usual imitation exercises involved, such as listening to English tapes. Only in this way can more people naturally acquire the relevant syntax in good conversations. In English class, teachers often only pay attention to the dissemination of existing knowledge of books, including the terms of the recitation, dialogue and explain the texts, but often pass over or ignore to explain the sentence structure. Even if some teachers explained the grammar in class, but most of the teachers used a kind of matter-of-block-style withfragmented explanation and translation model. Because of the importance of English grammar or syntax are ignored in the methods of grammar learning process, many students can not get into the university because of the weak knowledge of its grammar, syntax, the concept. Similarly, they can not properly analyze sentence structure in reading comprehension. As a result they gulped down little grammar knowledge. According to incomplete statistics: about 80% of the students admitted that their English test scores are not ideal, mainly because the concept of syntactic structure, vocabulary, grammar, translation, or writing. Today, we stress college English teaching reform in order to improve the English ability of students. Therefore, the voice of grammar teaching should return into the classroom gains more and more strongly support.NotesFor all the examples in the thesis, they are quoted from the following books:《英语教学法教程》《转型期的英语教学》《英语课程标准解读》《英语语法概要》（注：可编辑下载，若有不当之处，请指正，谢谢!）。
