An Empirical Study Of New Zealand Intermediate School Students’ Acquisition Of "Lai" And "Qu" Directional Complement

When it comes to directional complement,it could be said that it’s possibly one of the most important topics in Chinese grammar and,at the same time,one of the difficulties for foreigners to learn.Academic research on directional complements focuses primarily on the directional complement language ontology,the teaching of it,and the acquisition and errors of foreign students.Among them,relevant research from the perspective of cognitive linguistics focuses mainly on the interpretation of cognitive semantics.There are few applied studies on cognitive linguistics in teaching,and an empirical study is also lacking.Based on the theoretical basis of cognitive linguistic image schemas,metaphors,language teaching and embodiment,this paper builds a cognitive teaching method for directional complements and chooses as experimental objects secondary school students from New Zealand who study Mandarin,comparing traditional teaching methods and testing the influence of cognitive teaching method on the second language acquisition effect of directional complement.Research questions include:(1)Does cognitive teaching have a significant effect on students’ acquisition of directional complements?(2)If there is,is the effect related to the learner’s age and gender?(3)Does the cognitive teaching method affect learners’ subjective cognitive feelings?Based on the above questions,this paper surveyed students in grades 7-8 at Chisnallwood Intermediate School,Christchurch,New Zealand,whose native language is English and who studied Mandarin for one year.Through the test,72 students with similar Chinese proficiency were selected and divided into two different groups,cognitive and ordinary.The first group was taught by the cognitive teaching method,while the second group by the ordinary semantic teaching method.The data was obtained through tests and questionnaires.Using the independent sample T-test and correlation analysis in SPSS23.0 to analyze the data and draw the study conclusions,the results are as follows:(1)The average and correct rate of the cognitive group is higher than the ordinary group,and there are significant differences between the two groups,indicating that the cognitive teaching method has a considerable effect on the acquisition of "lai" and "qu" directional complements.(2)There were no significant differences on age and gender in the cognitive group.(3)The subjective experience of the cognitive group in terms of fun,practicality and acceptance is more obvious than that of the ordinary group.Among them,there are notable distinctions between the cognitive class and the general group in terms of practicality.It shows that the cognitive teaching method reduces students’ resentment towards studying directional complement grammar,and their enthusiasm for learning is greater.This paper adopts empirical method to teaching and provides an instructional design on directional complement which is one of the long-term difficulties in teaching Chinese as a foreign language.The instructional design under the guidance of cognitive theory confirmed its effectiveness as a teaching method.Therefore,this article presents the corresponding teaching suggestions,use the cognitive teaching theory as a guide to design teaching process and classroom activities of the directional complements "lai" and "qu”;it is useful to reduce the difficulty and improve the learning effect.