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2. Practical Significance

As for practical significance, the findings and suggestions of the thesis will provide practical reference value. To begin with, for teachers, the performance assessment designed according to NECS and the corpus established based on real learners’ writing products can be used by English teachers. Besides, by verifying the effectiveness of performance assessment in enhancing students’ grammatical competence and their interest in grammar learning, this paper can provide a new assessment method in the ITLA of grammar. Moreover, it can develop students’ core competencies. For example, the competence of error correctness will develop their language accuracy. And self-assessment as a metacognitive strategy can improve their ability to learn independently and peer assessment can cultivate their cooperation ability.

CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 Studies of Grammatical Competence

2.1.1 Definitions of Grammatical Competence

The definition of grammatical competence lays a foundation for the discussion of grammar instruction and assessment. The definition of grammatical competence can be traced back to Chomsky’s theory. Chomsky (1965) is the earliest linguist who put forward the notion of “competence” in linguistics and distinguishes the difference between “competence” and “performance”. In his view, competence refers to “the ideal knowledge of the rules of one’s language”. Even though he argues that grammar is independent of “meaning” and denies the actual use of grammar in some specific situations, his theory has still built the foundation for the following research on language competence.

On the basis of the notion of competence proposed by Chomsky, Hymes (1971) expands it with a more specific notion, that is, “communicative competence” to depict learners’ tacit language knowledge and the ability to use it. Chomsky’s (1965) concepts of competence and performance are combined under “communicative competence”, which also highlights the significance of context utterance. Furthermore, Hymes presents that there are four key factors in communicative competence, which are “possibility, feasibility, appropriateness, and performance.” But some linguists disagree with the viewpoint of grammar proposed by Chomsky. For example, Cannale and Swain (1980) argue that grammar is independent of meaningfulness and they maintain that correct as the pattern of a sentence is, the meaning of the sentence might be inappropriate in sociolinguistics. Based on the view and inspired by Hymes’ descriptions of language use, they enrich Hymes’ communicative competence and propose a new model of communicative competence composed of grammatical competence, sociolinguistic competence, discourse competence, and strategic competence. In this model, grammatical competence is defined as the ability to correctly understand and use the knowledge of phonology, lexicology, syntax, and semantics, which embodies the lexico-grammatical or semantico-grammatical features of the language (Purpura, 2012). 

2.2 Studies of Performance Assessment

It is necessary for both teachers and learners to know how well learners achieve the target learning objectives. However, according to Bob Len本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。