An Empirical Research Of The Effect Of Goldberg’s CG-based Approach On Chinese Senior High School Students’ Ditransitive Structure Proficiency

Construction Grammar(CG),headed by Goldberg(1995),is a novel approach in cognitive linguistics that highlights a form-meaning connection,with the proposal that the grammar rule has an independent and complete meaning embedded in itself and such kind of meaning in fact is motivated.In light of this theory,CG can provide L2 learners with better conceptual organizational tools to tackle the sentences’ patterns to the meaning.The use of CG research approach and prototype theory serves L2 teachers and learners with a new perspective of understanding of many English syntactic patterns(grammar),particularly of ditransitive structure(DS)because of its numerous relevant verbs.This research investigates high school students’ current use of grammatical learning strategies in perspective of CG approach and tentatively evaluates the effectiveness of CG-based instruction on English ditransitive structure,as well as explores students’ attitude towards CG-based intervention with a teaching experiment.165 students of the second grade of a senior high school in Jieyang participated in the grammatical learning strategy investigation.Students’ current grammatical learning situation is surveyed with a self-design Likert-scale grammatical questionnaire.Based on the analysis of the data collected with SPSS 17.0,it was found that the overall frequency of grammatical strategy was quite low and imbalanced use of grammatical learning strategy was also shown,therefore CG-based instruction is needed in that it can be taken as a useful way to improve the current situation.To solve this problem,a six-period teaching experiment was conducted on110 students of the second grade of a senior high school from two parallel classes.Students were required to have an overall grammatical knowledge test as the pre-test of their general grammatical proficiency.Subsequently,the test targeting at English ditransitive structure was taken as post-test after the six-period teaching experiment,along with an interview reflecting their attitude towards CG-based intervention.Relevant data collected during this process was analyzed from quantitative and qualitative perspectives for a tentative evaluation of the effectiveness of CG-based instruction.The major findings of this research in this thesis are summarized as follows: 1)Grammatical learning strategies in perspective of CG-based approach are not frequently used by senior high school students.2)The ranking of all the grammatical learning strategies from highest to lowest frequency of use is shown as followed:structured reviewing,associating,placing new words into a context,using imagery,semantic mapping,grouping,using physical response or sensation.3)CG-based teaching approach can effectively improve senior high school students’ proficiency of English ditransitive structure.4)Students of the second grade of a senior high school generally held a positive attitude towards CG-based instruction in terms of English ditransitive structure.Based on the above findings,this research proposes that teachers can impart DS from a CG-based perspective so as to improve students’ English DS proficiency.