An Empirical Study Of Figure-Ground Theory To English Cleft Sentence Teaching In Senior High School

Grammar plays a very important role in English teaching and learning.As an important grammar point of senior high school English,English cleft sentences are frequently used and examined in college entrance examination.However,the structure of cleft sentence is complex and varied,which makes it difficult to use in practice.In recent years,with the continuous development of cognitive linguistics,people begin to pay attention to the cognitive mechanism behind language learning.As an important theory of cognitive linguistics,the figure-ground theory has a strong cognitive explanatory power to English cleft sentence structure.Therefore,this paper tries to use the figure-ground theory to guide the teaching of English cleft sentence,so as to verify whether this theory has positive influences to the English cleft sentences teaching.This paper attempts to explore its positive effects from three aspects: learning results,learning interests and learning beliefs.In order to verify the positive effects of the figure-ground theory in English cleft sentence teaching in senior high school,this study carries out a comparative teaching experiment.Two classes in senior high school are selected as the experimental subjects.The experimental class learns the cleft sentence under the instruction of figure-ground theory while the controlled class learns cleft sentence only by traditional teaching method.In order to achieve the purpose of the experiment,this study adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods,mainly including a pre-test,a post-test,two questionnaires and classroom observation.Through the data collection and analysis,the results show that the figure-groundbased teaching has positive impacts on English cleft sentences learning of senior high school students.The main reason is that under the guidance of the figure-ground theory,students can understand the internal cognitive mechanism that dominates the language phenomenon which can stimulate their interest of learning,so as to effectively improve their understanding and mastery of English cleft sentences.Through this study,the author verifies the positive effects of the application of figure-ground theory to English cleft sentence teaching in senior high school.Although there are many deficiencies of this study,it still has positive significance.On the one hand,using the figure-ground theory to guide grammar teaching not only brings many new methods and new ideas for foreign language teaching,but also provides new methods for students to learn and acquire English cleft sentences.On the other hand,this study also provides new evidence for the further application and development of cognitive salience and figure-ground theory.