| English present perfect aspect is an important but difficult grammar item for junior English learners.Most of existing linguistic and the teaching studies of English present perfect aspect do not attach equal importance to students’ mastery of the form and the meaning of a grammatical item,and they pay less attention to the relationship between cognition and language learning,which is not conducive to students’ learning of grammar such as English present perfect aspect（EPPA）.Specifically,the scholars have suggested that only by mastering the form and the meaning of English present perfect aspect can middle school students truly master it.Besides,without paying much attention to cognition and language,the tasks assigned are likely to beyond students’ cognitive abilities that is also not conducive to their learning.As for Cognitive Construction Grammar（CCG）,it attaches equal importance to the form and the meaning of a linguistic item,and pays great attention to the relationship between cognition and language learning that may help solve the current dilemma.Moreover,few empirical studies have focused on exploring the CCG-based teaching method on junior high school students’ acquisition of English present perfect aspect.Hence,this study sets out to conduct a teaching experiment to investigate the impact of the CCGbased teaching method on the comprehension and the production of English present perfect aspect of the junior high school students.This study tries to figure out two research questions: 1)What is the effect of the teaching based on Cognitive Construction Grammar on the comprehension of English present perfect aspect of the junior high school students? 2)What is the effect of the teaching based on Cognitive Construction Grammar on the production of English present perfect aspect of the junior high school students? 112 students who come from two parallel classes of a junior high school in Taishan City,participate in this experiment which lasts for 13 weeks.These two classes share the same teaching contents but various teaching methods: the CCG-based teaching method is employed in the experimental group（EG,N=57）while the traditional teaching method is adopted in the control group（CG,N=55）.Instruments including tests and interviews are used to collect the data.The pre-test is conducted in CG and EG before teaching implementation while the immediate and delayed post-tests are employed after teaching implementation,and the interviews are only adopted for 20 interviewees who are randomly selected from EG after the experiment.The results show that compared with the traditional teaching method,the teaching method under the guidance of CCG has a positive effect on junior high school students’ comprehension.It can promote students’ understanding of the grammatical rules of EPPA,and improve their abilities of monitoring and correcting the sentences containing the targeted grammar.Furthermore,the CCG-based teaching method also has a positive effect on junior high school students’ production.It can increase the accuracy of the output of the students on the sentence and discourse levels in a specific context.Finally,the study implies some pedagogical implications.Firstly,teachers should guide students to summarize the grammatical rules from concrete examples instead of presenting directly;secondly,teachers are supposed to provide high-frequency meaningful input and multiple exercises.Meanwhile,authentic contexts that are related to students’ existing knowledge or real-life experience should be adopted.Finally,teachers should teach the grammar from prototypical constructions to non-prototypical constructions,from regular rules to irregular rules. |
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