The Application Of Concept-Based Instruction To Grammar Teaching Of Present Perfect Tense In Junior High Schools

The present perfect tense is a complex tense that involves a backward-looking stance from a viewpoint at the present moment,which is considered as an important and difficult teaching point in junior high schools.However,the traditional grammar teaching places excessive dependence on the rule of thumb and simply explains it with frequently-used adverbials such as recently,since,already,and guides students to understand sentence meanings by translating exercises into Chinese.The lack of in-depth analysis of the meanings of present perfect tense causes students to be overpowered by habitual thinking,to the extent of misusing it.Recently,Concept-Based Instruction,the latest teaching method in this century proposed by SCT scholars,has inspired the tense teaching.It advocates presenting explicit and coherent grammar concepts to learners,then materializing the relevant concepts through a sequence of activities to promote internalization and communicative competence.There is a lack of relevant studies at home,though prevailing abroad.Therefore,this study attempts to apply Concept-Based Instruction to the teaching of the present perfect tense in junior high school to investigate the effect of this new teaching method on students’ acquisition through the teaching experiment.Based on the summary of several meanings that scholars put forward to acquire the present perfect tense,the study adopts Quirk and Wang’s version and attempts to address the following research questions:（1）What is the effect of Concept-Based Instruction on junior high school students’ learning of the state meaning of present perfect tense?（2）What is the effect of Concept-Based Instruction on junior high school students’learning of the event meaning of present perfect tense?（3）What is the effect of Concept-Based Instruction on junior high school students’ learning of the habitual meaning of present perfect tense?In order to find out the answers to the above three questions,this study adopts a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods.In the quantitative study,the subjects,86 students in Grade 2 of a junior high school in Changzhou,include 42 students in the experimental class and 44 students in the control class.The pretest manifests that there is no significant difference in learning between the two classes before the experiment.The control class uses the traditional grammar teaching method,while the experimental class adopts Concept-Based Instruction.After the teaching experiment,the students of the two classes both take the post-test to examine their learning outcomes in terms of the state,event,and habitual meaning of present perfect tense.All data are processed by SPSS,including independent sample T-test.The qualitative research is conducted in the form of interviews.Six interviewees are selected from the experimental group,two of which represent the high,middle,and low achievers respectively,and their interviews are recorded and finally converted into English for further analysis.The major findings of the research are listed as follows:（1）In the learning of the state meaning of present perfect tense,the statistics show that there is a significant difference between CC and EC,indicating Concept-Based Instruction has an advantage over the traditional one.Students in EC are able to understand this meaning completely through materialization.（2）In the learning of the event meaning of present perfect tense,the average score of EC is much higher than that of CC.It is concluded that Concept-Based Instruction is effective in promoting the acquisition of the event meaning of present perfect tense.Students in EC can alleviate the interference effect of mother tongue,therefore,they can use the event meaning accurately in the appropriate contexts.（3）In the learning of the habitual meaning of present perfect tense,there is no significant difference between two groups.We can tentatively conclude that Concept-Based Instruction has no significant effect on students’learning of the habitual meaning of present perfect tense.The main teaching implications of this research are:（1）The teacher should elicit students to probe into the nature of present perfect tense,instead of focusing on its superficial form.（2）Concept-Based Instruction can be regarded as a complementary method to traditional teaching methods.（3）The idea of student-centered learning should be born in mind during the whole teaching process.It is of necessity to attach the daily experiences of students to the acquisition of three meanings of present perfect tense.Finally,this study also has certain limitations,such as limited sample size,limited time in learning and testing,which need to be improved in the subsequent studies.