Grammar Instruction in the 1st Grade of Senior High School: a Comparative Study of two Methods

The present dissertation endeavours to investigate the effectiveness of two opposing grammar teaching approaches on students’ performance in the 1st grade of a Greek State Senior High School. This study, in particular, compares the learning outcomes of the meaning-focused grammar teaching approach, based on a communication-based perspective of language against the outcomes of traditional, structure-based teaching. For the collection of data, a pretest-posttest experiment was conducted, involving the teaching of the Reported speech grammar form to two groups of randomly selected students in a Greek Senior High School. One group of students attended a series of lessons on the Reported Speech through the structure-based approach, while the other one was presented with the same structure in a meaning-focused way. The study has found significant statistical differences in favour of the meaning-focused teaching approach, as it was demonstrated by the outcome that the students of the relevant group were far more successful when compared to their schoolmates of the other group in their attempts to form Reported Speech promptly and accurately as well as use it in a quite fluent way to accomplish relevant contextualised tasks.