A Study Of Construction Grammar In Junior High English Tense Teaching

Construction Grammar(CG),emerging from the 1980 s,has now become one of the major concerns in linguistic research.It lays emphasis upon the pairing of form and function or form and meaning/intent,basing construction acquisition upon adequate examples in the context.In China,an increasing number of grammar teaching studies have been conducted from the perspective of CG.However,the traditional way of grammar teaching is still prevailing in high school English classes;CG-guided English tense teaching in the junior high calls for an empirical study.According to Adele Goldberg’s CG theory(1995,2006),this research made an experiment at Wuxi Jinxing Junior High School in an attempt to optimize junior high English tense teaching.Of the author’s two Grade 7 classes,Class 8 with 39 students was chosen as the experimental class and Class 6 with 40 students as the control class.The experiment lasted one semester(from March—June,2016),during which Oxford English Book 7B was used as textbook,and two tenses(simple future and simple past)were chosen as experiment object.CG acquisition mode was tried in the experimental class,while the control class continued the conventional method.The research tools adopted were one questionnaire and two tests.The former,“Junior High Grammar Learning Strategy Questionnaire”,was derived from “Writing Strategy Questionnaire” by Petric and Czarl(2003)with considerable adjustments to suit this experiment;the latter was the pre-test and the post-test(2015-2016 Wuxi two final exams for Grade 7)taken in the two classes to examine how CG tense teaching affected the English score.The research data collected from the tests and questionnaire were compared and analyzed via SPSS 19.0.The results reveal that the application of CG to English tense teaching can effectively increase students’ participation in grammar learning,obviously change their learning methods and habits,and help improve their English performance comprehensively.The survey and its findings are expected to provide worthy reference for English teachers to transform concepts in grammar,update modes of grammar class and hence settle the difficulties in current high school grammar teaching.