A Cognitive Approach To English Tense Teaching In Middle Schools

The present situation with tense teaching in middle schools is that quite some English teachers, in their teaching practice, still hold that tense expresses time, and that different tense forms are correspondent with different time concepts respectively;when , in reality, a tense is not consistent with time, they will, on the basis of morphological reality, conclude that one tense can express more than one unit of time, and that one unit of time can be expressed by more than one tense, without probing into the essential causes for these language phenomena and thus unable to give a sound explanation of them. As a result, the students they teach are at a loss about how to express themselves with tense and they often make a lot of mistakes concerning tense. In this thesis, the importance of tense and tense teaching, the present situation and problems with tense teaching in middle schools, and the causes for these problems are covered. Different definitions of tense and tense systems are reviewed, and the "two-tense-and-four-aspect" theory, which has been advanced in conformity with the cognitive law, is favored. Emphasis is laid on the theoretical basis, the possibility, and practical ways of teaching tense from a cognitive perspective and the viewpoint this thesis holds is tested through a relevant investigation into a teaching experiment with this approach. Our purpose is to make clear the essence of tense from a cognitive perspective and help popularize the approach to tense teaching in middle schools. It is hoped that when this approach is used in teaching tense in middle schools, a better result will be achieved, enabling the students to use tense correctly according to the cognitive lawin their use of English.We hold that tense is the result of cognition. It is the grammatical form with which people express the time relation between action states, which are denoted by the verb, and the reference time.The "time relations" between an action state, denoted by the verb, and their reference time, is the essential grammatical meaning of tense. When we teach tense, we should enable the students to understand the time relations between action states and the reference time so that they can choose tense forms correctly according to what they want to express or the needs of context. What's more, the students can be made to understand many problems with tense within the framework of "time relation", such as the problem with the inconsistence between tense and time, the problems with tense sequence and tense system.If there is something new in this thesis, it is the suggestion and approach of teaching tense according to the cognitive laws. It is hoped that through this kind of teaching, the students can learn and try to master the forms, meanings and uses of tense according to cognitive laws. Consequently, the inconsistence of tense and time is expected to be better accounted for, which will lay a solid foundation for middle school students in their study of English.