On the Application of Communicative Approach in Grammar Teaching in Junior Middle SchoolsIntroduction Grammar teaching has always been one of the most controversial and least understood aspects of language teaching. There are three main traditional language teaching methods, Grammar-Translation Method, Direct Method and Audio-Lingual Method, which have dominated the FLT field for a long period. The status of grammar teaching in these three teaching methods was different. However, in China, grammar teaching is always the key teaching content in ELT. Chinese students spend years studying grammar, but most of them, even the students who can get a high mark in the exam still have difficulties in using English in communication effectively. This inability reflects that traditional grammar teaching greatly limits communicative competence in the real life, which departs from the goals of grammar teaching. English new course standard points out clearly that English course should stress the further development of integrated skills, and improve the students abilities of achieving information, dealing with information analyzing problems, and solving problems in English. Therefore, Communicative Approach, or CA, appears to be an effective method in grammar teaching. CA offers more opportunities for students to learn grammar in an interesting and active way. Understandably, there came some problems when CA was first introduced and applied to the Chinese situation. Difficulties with the application of CA include, among others, lack of real language environment, the large number of students in one class and so on. Whats worse, some teachers are often confused by a swarm of mixed messages about the place of grammar teaching in the communicative language classroom. They even doubt whether CA may involve a neglected role of grammar teaching. The purpose of this paper is to help teachers to understand the right relationship between CA and grammar teaching, and try to explore an optional English grammar teaching by means of communicative activities in Junior Middle Schools. In terms of the structure of this paper, following this introduction part, Part One will be a profile of grammar teaching, which reviews the status of grammar teaching in three traditional language teaching methods. This part also points out that the importance and necessity of grammar teaching and analyses the current situation of grammar teaching in senior middle schools. Next in Part Two a thorough introduction of CA is provided which helps the readers to understand CA further. The paper also discusses the right relationship between CA and grammar teaching. Part Three introduces some practical and effective application of CA in the aspects of communicative competence and the procedure of grammar teaching. Some particular communicative extracurricular activities are also presented as examples to show how to apply CA in grammar teaching. I. A Profile of Grammar Teaching Grammar has been the focus in the field of FLT for several decades, but the attitudes towards grammar teaching have changed several times. The status of grammar teaching in different language teaching methods turns to be different. In these three mainly traditional language teaching methods, Grammar-Translation Method, Direct Method and Audio-Lingual Method, grammar teaching was not dealt with rightly. In these methods, grammar teaching could not reach its goals and its value had been doubted. These methods do not put grammar in the right place which is completely different from CA. In next part, the paper will address the relationship between CA and grammar teaching. As a basic teaching content in FLT, grammar teaching should not be ignored in terms of the importance and necessity, although the current situation of grammar teaching is not good enough.A. Grammar Teaching in Different Language Teaching Methods A review of FLT abroad presents that the status of grammar and the way people deal with grammar fluctuate in different language teaching methods. According to the three traditional language teaching methods, Grammar- Translation Method, Direct Method and Audio-Lingual Method, the status of grammar teaching is different. 1. Grammar Teaching in Grammar-Translation Method Grammar-Translation, as its name suggests, took grammar as the starting point for instruction. Grammar was put in the central place of FLT and taught in a deductive way. Grammar-Translation courses followed a grammar syllabus and lessons typically began with an explicit statement of the rule, followed by exercises involving translation into and out of the mother tongue.1 The aim of it was to teach students to know the grammatical rules which were explained and practiced with lots of mechanical exercises, and then let the students understand, read and translate the target sentences or texts. Therefore, with this method, grammar teaching played