Different Attitudes Towards Grammar Teaching and Testing

Teaching grammar plays a central role in every ESL / EFL teacher's classroom and it can often be a challenge. Grammar pedagogy had been the source of much debate. Teachers believed that the foreign language is best learned when students are asked to memorize rules. In the 1960’s, with ideas about the cognitive approach of gaining knowledge, Chomsky changed the view on language teaching and also the attitude towards grammar teaching and learning. During the 1980’s ideas emerged about language being acquired due to exposure to the target language. Nevertheless, language teachers never really gave up grammar teaching or grammar testing. Grammar is now viewed as one of the components of communicative competence and there is no doubt that this is a category to be measured when investigating an individual's performance. However, there is a surprising lack of consensus on what type of assessment tasks might best allow teachers to infer grammatical knowledge and how to design tasks that elicit grammatical knowledge from students. The question is what a teacher will choose to assess and in what way the assessment will be carried out. It is important for language teachers to select the type of assessments that best match assessment goals. Grammatical test tasks are activities designed to test the knowledge or ability. In designing grammar tests, we need to be familiar with a wide range of activities to elicit grammatical performance. Currently, knowledge of grammar can be tested in different ways: it can be inferred from the ability to select a grammatically correct answer from several options on a multiple-choice test, to supply a grammatically accurate word in a paragraph or text, to construct grammatically appropriate sentences etc. The aim of our study is to investigate what influences learners` attitudes towards learning English grammar. The students’ opinions are important as they can throw light on the teaching process. We designed a questionnaire to find out our students' attitude towards grammar assessment, which was followed by a grammar test. The aim was to get an insight into their attitudes and opinions and study was carried out on a sample of 212 first- year students of Business Trade and Accounting and Finance. The result showed the importance of designing different types of grammar tests in order to enhance the effectiveness of learning outcome.