Abstract:

Learning a foreign language should not be viewed as a simple process of accumulating knowledge, it should be understood as a complex activity which stimulates both the development of intellectual abilities and skills, and the construction of strong values, attitudes and motivations. Active strategies offer an extended frame for organising an effective teaching and learning process that embodies these principles naturally. The main aim of this paper is to present the importance and necessity of practising and consolidating grammar – as a key element in developing communicative competence – using active strategies. We believe that teachers need to devise and use a variety of active methods, procedures and techniques that should suit students' needs and be efficient in developing their communicative skills, encouraging them to make the leap from producing correct structures to composing their own free speech or writing.

The importance of teaching grammar to high-school students, and upon different types of techniques and activities, both designed to introduce language forms to students and to get them to practise the acquired knowledge in order to develop their communicative skills. Further on, we introduce an approach to consolidating language structures, as a significant part of the learning process, which lends itself to the prerequisites of an active strategy. This paper will prove that in order to teach and consolidate language structures, by connecting them in communicative work, and at the same time to make the class as entertaining and pleasant as possible, teachers should use systematically a mixture of activities that combine individual and group work, and encourage learning through co-operation and discovery.

Concerning the possibility of improving the learning process, we have three aspects in view: the students' ability of acquiring, interpreting and using the new knowledge, the students' degree of involvement in the learning process, and the students' interest in learning the English language. In order to construct an efficient strategy for consolidating grammar, we have performed a mixture of traditional methods for reinforcing grammatical structures, using a structured model (without any form of learning oriented towards discovery or active forms of student groupings), and modern learning methods which aim at broadening students' knowledge and learning experiences. The objectives of the research are: to establish the pedagogical value of the active strategy of consolidating by assessing students' interest and involvement in the learning activity where this mixture of strategies is used and to determine students' degree of acquiring and using new language structures by relating their communicative competence to the objectives set in the curriculum. The methodological research was conducted during last school year, included three classes of 9th grade students, out of which two classes acted as respondents, and the other class was involved as a control group. It is important to mention that all three classes had had the same syllabus which was based on the textbook English My Love, and the same number of English hours allocated in the curriculum. At the two classes which acted as our respondents, during the consolidation hours, besides the activities that aimed to systematise and reinforce knowledge, we introduced an active strategy which consisted, of using extra communicative activities.

Keywords:

Learning, english grammar, adults students, assesing performance, comunicative skills.