Communicative Grammar Teaching within the Scope of English for Specific Purposes University Course

Abstract

The article discusses the necessity to implement communicative approach to grammar teaching process within the scope of English for Specific Purposes university course at Ukrainian higher educational establishments. Since grammar is an important and indispensable part of language learning and it is impossible to make oneself understood or comprehend others without a correctly structured and grammatically accurate message, then grammar teaching methodology is of particular importance in the foreign language acquisition process and should be given special attention. In the sphere of ESP studying, the goal of which is the formation of students’ professional target language communicative competence, students should be taught grammar from the perspective of how to use it to achieve a specific communicative goal. Thus, the grammatical competence acquisition of ESP students should be focused on how to use grammatical rules for communicative purposes to satisfy professional needs, rather than just memorizing or drilling them with subsequent written exercises in isolation from meaningful context. The author of the present article discusses different approaches to grammar teaching, specifies the communicative grammar teaching ideas and principles, reveals the ways of communicative approach to grammar teaching application within the scope of studying English for Specific Purposes by students majoring in Economics as well as analyzes specific activities that facilitate teaching grammar communicatively in ESP classes. The research shows that communicative approach to grammar teaching integrates grammar principles into a communicative framework, supports attention to both form and function, favors a student-centered interactive teaching model and defines contextualization as its important requirement. The author of the article focuses on individual tasks, pair work and groupwork as the most efficient methods to teach grammar communicatively and specifies sentence fillers, class research, substitution dialogue, pyramid discussion, question games as some of the fruitful activities stimulating grammatical accuracy development through solving communicative tasks.