The Effect Of Prototype-guided Teaching On Senior High School Students' Learning Of Present Perfect Tense

As an important grammatical category,present perfect tense has always been the focus of linguists' studies.However,according to the interviews and previous studies,so complex is tense that both students and teachers feel hard to deal with it,which results from traditional grammar teaching,Chinese students' cognitive background and cognitive abilities.In order to solve these problems,from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,this paper refers to discussing the effect of prototype-guided teaching on students' learning of present perfect tense.This instruction is based on Prototype Theory and SER,in which the former is used to connect various uses of present perfect tense,while the latter is used to explain.This essay aims at studying the high school learners' cognitive mechanism of acquiring English tenses,and establishing the cognitive models of prototypical and non-prototypical uses of present perfect tense in order to improve the teaching and learning effect of present perfect tense.To solve the existing problems in the teaching and learning of present perfect tense,the author designs a prototype-guided teaching.The main objective of the empirical study is to explore whether prototype-guided teaching has effects on senior high school students' learning of present perfect tense.The author conduct the research from two different aspects to find the specific effects.One is from the angle of different uses of present perfect tense,and the other is from the angle of different levels of students.So,two research questions are as follows:(1)What are the overall differences in the effect of prototype-guided teaching on senior high school students' learning of present perfect tense between EC and CC?(a)What's the effect of prototype-guided teaching on the learning of prototypical uses of present perfect tense?(b)What's the effect of prototype-guided teaching on the learning of non-prototypical uses of present perfect tense?(2)For different levels(low-level,medium-level,high-level)of students,what's the effect of prototype-guided teaching on their learning of present perfect tense?The study employs both quantitative method and qualitative method.The qualitative research mainly involves the interview with six representative students.The quantitative research involves 100 students in Grade Ten from The Second Middle School of Jiangsu Gao You,among which 51 students are in the experimental class(EC)and 49 students are in the control class(CC).According to the pretest,the EC and the CC have no significant differences in terms of the English tense competence.The students in the EC are taught by implementing prototype-guided teaching,while the students in the CC are taught through the conventional method.After the experiment,the results of the post-test are analyzed by the Independent Samples T-Test in SPSS.The major findings can be summarized as follows:the author sums up two prototypical uses and two non-prototypical uses of present perfect tense according to the Deep English Grammar(Wang 2004),and designs the cognitive diagram for each use of present perfect tense.Besides,the answers to the two research questions are as follows:(1)prototype-guided teaching has little influence on the learning of the prototypical uses of present perfect tense,but has significant effect on the learning of the non-prototypical uses of present perfect tense;(2)For different proficient levels of senior high school students,prototype-guided teaching has significant effect on medium-level students' learning of present perfect tense,but there is no significant effect on both high-level and low-level students.The pedagogical implications of the study are that:(1)prototype-guided teaching is conducive to the learning of present perfect tense;(2)prototype-guided teaching contributes to the popularity of cognitive teaching method;(3)applying prototype theory into the English tense broadens and deepens the students' understanding of the nature of present perfect tense.Finally,there are still some limitations in the study,such as the small sample size,without other tenses' different usages involved,the limited time of the experiment etc.Therefore,future studies are needed for the further improvement.