The Effect Of Construction-Oriented Grammar Teaching On Senior High School Students’ Learning Of English Full-verb Inversion Construction

In terms of sentence order,the basic pattern of modern English is SVO while there are some semantically equivalent substitutes for them,in which the reversal of subject and verb is called inversion.A full-verb inversion is formed when the full verb is placed before the subject.It’s one of the most significant grammar items in senior high school English learning for that a good command of full-verb inversion can not only improve students’ reading comprehension ability but also their writing ability.However,traditional grammar teaching only focuses on the explanation of full-verb inversion’s form and then the mechanical practice,neglecting to guide students to explore the semantic meaning it conveys and its functions in texts,which makes it impossible for students to use them flexibly.Although some empirical studies have been conducted in the teaching of full-verb inversion from the perspective of cognitive linguistics,few adopted the construction-oriented approach to the senior high school students’ learning of full-verb inversion.Guided by the theories of Construction Grammar,this thesis seeks to teach students the form and meaning of full-verb inversion construction,which are classified by C.Rong(2003)from the perspective of human cognition.It therefore makes up for the drawbacks of traditional grammar teaching,which separates form from meaning.The full-verb inversion construction includes the prototypical full-verb inversion construction:LOC BE(locative+ be+subject)construction and the two non-prototypical full-verb inversion constructions:PATH Vm(path+verb of motion+subject)construction and NASPT BE(non-spatial+be+subject)construction.This thesis aims to investigate the effect of construction-oriented grammar teaching on senior high school students’ learning of full-verb inversion constructions,with three more specific research questions listed as follows:(1)What’s the effect of construction-oriented grammar teaching on senior high school students’ learning of LOC BE inversion construction?(2)What’s the effect of construction-oriented grammar teaching on senior high school students’ learning of PATH Vm inversion construction?(3)What’s the effect of construction-oriented grammar teaching on senior high school students’ learning of NSPAT BE inversion construction?A quantitative research is adopted in this study and a total of 80 students are recruited from Grade Two in a Nanjing senior high school.In the quantitative study,Class One,Grade Two is the control class while Class Two,Grade Two is the experimental class,with each has 40 students.A traditional grammar teaching method and a construction-oriented grammar teaching approach are applied in these two classes separately and both classes are given a pre-test.The pre-test aims to check if there are significant differences between EC and CC in their English proficiency.The post-test is a specifically designed grammar test paper of full-verb inversion construction with the purpose of checking students’ mastery of each type of full-verb inversion construction.It involves three parts:sentence unscramble,translation and sentence paraphrase.The data collected through the research is analyzed by the independent sample T-test in SPSS.After the quantitative analysis of the collected data,the research draws the following conclusions:(1)In the learning of LOC BE inversion construction,the data shows that there is no significant difference between the experimental class and the control class(p=.653>.05),students in EC and CC both have a good command of this type of full-verb inversion construction.(2)In the learning of PATH Vm inversion construction,the data shows that there is a significant difference between the experimental class and the control class(p=.000<.05)and the students in experimental class can better grasp and understand the form and meaning of this type of full-verb inversion construction.(3)In the learning of NSPAT BE inversion construction,the data shows that there is a significant difference between the experimental class and the control class(p=.000<.05)and the construction-oriented grammar teaching facilitates students’comprehension of this more abstract full-verb inversion construction.The pedagogical implications of this study are:(1)Teachers should view grammar items as form-meaning pairs and guide students to compare the different meanings conveyed by different constructions.(2)Teachers should attach importance to guide students to autonomously generalize the form and meaning of construction in the process of exploration.(3)In grammar teaching and learning,teachers should abide by the law of students’ cognition,extending from prototypical constructions to non-prototypical constructions.Finally,this study also has some limitations,such as limited sample size,limited learning and testing time and these still need to be improved in the following studies.