Implications Of Event-frames For English Verb Teaching In Junior Middle School

As early as the mid-twentieth century, researchers discussed about verb acquisition and did many experiments, and they made a conclusion that verb acquisition is more difficult than noun acquisition. In China, most researches focus on verb learning in the process of listening, speaking, reading and writing, but there are few teaching methods to teach students to learn manner verb and path verb correctly.Recently, Chinese junior middle school students have a problem of over use manner verb than path verb, and in their expression, they make more errors of path verb than manner verb. Therefore, the present study is based on the typology and Slobin's thinking for speaking hypothesis, and it concerns the dynamic process of English verb acquisition in Chinese junior middles school students, and it is meant to continue to open up the concept of event-frames in teaching English verbs. In the research, it illustrated and examined how manner verb and path verb are expressed in event-frames characterization in daily English studying course among Chinese junior middle students.The study analyzes the verb expressions of students from two classes of a junior middle school in Dongguan City, Guangdong Province. The participants of the study consisted of 104 junior middle school students. This project tried to examine factors that determine choosing correct verbs by non-native speakers. Firstly, the research collected error types of verb in the CLEC Corpus. Secondly, it classified the errors most frequently found in the middle school students'expressions. Thirdly, analyzing the errors in event-frames and discussion on the verb acquisition were illustrated.Major results of this study show that: (1) Chinese junior middle school students in this study produced more correct manner verbs than path verbs. They also described event-frames by expressing manner and ignoring path more frequently than describing them by expressing path and ignoring manner. Besides, Chinese junior middle school students have difficulty in using path verbs meaning ENTER or EXIT.(2) Apart from their attention to manner, another interesting finding of the present investigation was that some young students had a very low tendency to elaborate manner further than a particular level, for instance, WALK and RUN, despite their apparent attention bias to manner.(3) The study presented in this paper indicated that a semantic focus in descriptions of event-frames by Chinese junior middle school students had difficulty using certain path verbs that are quite frequently used by English native speakers. However, the lexical and grammatical characteristics of S- languages seem to be in place from an early age, with regarding how manner and path are typically expressed, more general discourse characteristics of S-languages need to be learned by the students throughout their childhood. Maybe in this way, students can slowly overcome certain cognitive and linguistic limitations and tendencies.Insights gained from this study are that language-specificity, in terms of what aspects of events are attended to and how much they are elaborated in verbal descriptions, develops slowly, rather than being mastered at an early age. Teachers may find out that the high accuracy of verb expression can be developed with the growth of the students'knowledge of verb with using the event-frames to teach English verb.