The Relationship Between Japanese Junior High School Students' Grammatical Knowledge, Writing and Speaking Abilities

Abstract

This study aims to investigate English writing and speaking abilities through grammatical knowledge. The first step to cultivate learners who can use English productively is to understand the use of grammatical items when they want to express something in English. Junior high school students are beginner learners of English. They always make use of the knowledge which they learned in English grammar classes. However, they can not communicate with the ALT (Assistant Language Teacher) well. In this study, I tried to focus on teaching grammar to lead to communication. After learning grammar, students were forced to make sentences and speak using the grammatical items in regular English classes. Finally, an oral test and a written test were conducted to examine whether students can write or speak English using the grammatical item correctly. The future tense and "There is ..., there are..." were used in this study. This study attempts to examine the relationship between grammatical knowledge, writing and speaking abilities in a junior high school setting. 60 oral tests and written tests by 60 students were analyzed. As a result, some features on grammar were found.