| The English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education released by the Ministry of Education of P.R.China in 2022 endorses a three-dimensional approach to grammar instruction that integrates form,meaning and use.However,in the current English grammar teaching in junior high school,teachers focus heavily on teaching and practicing grammar rules to promote students’ mastery of forms,resulting in the segmentation of grammar form,meaning,and use.In recent years,concept-based instruction(CBI),proposed by Lantolf and his team(2011),has emphasized the teaching of concepts with the objective that students internalize the conceptual knowledge and know how to apply it to solve problems in a variety of contexts,which provides a new perspective on grammar instruction.At present,domestic and foreign studies exploring the impact of CBI on Chinese L2 learners’ acquisition of grammar form,meaning,and use have been scarce.Consequently,this study,based on sociocultural theory,examines the effectiveness of CBI on junior high school students’ acquisition of the present perfect tense,seeking to address the following two questions:(1)What are the immediate effects of CBI on students’ overall grammar test performance of the present perfect tense and their test performance as seen in form,meaning and use dimensions? and(2)What are the sustained effects of CBI on students’ overall grammar test performance of the present perfect tense and their test performance in terms of form,meaning and use dimensions?In this study,an eight-week teaching experiment was conducted with a total of82 participants from two parallel classes of grade nine in a junior high school in Yunfu City,Guangdong Province.During the teaching intervention,CBI was implemented in the experimental class(n = 40),whereas the 3P teaching method was utilized as usual in the control class(n = 42).The data were collected by means of grammar tests before and after the teaching intervention.After analyzing the data via SPSS 27.0,the following findings were obtained: the experimental class outperformed the control class in terms of their overall performance and performance on the meaning and use dimensions in the post-test regarding the present perfect tense,but no significant differences were found between their performance on the form dimension.In addition,the experimental class outperformed the control class on the overall performance and specific performance as seen in form,meaning,and use dimensions in the delayed test.According to the results above,the following conclusions were drawn: CBI exerts positive immediate effects on students’ overall grammar test performance of the present perfect tense and their test performance in the meaning and use dimensions.Additionally,CBI demonstrates remarkable sustained effects on students’ overall grammar test performance of the present perfect tense and their test performance of form,meaning and use dimensions.This study provides teachers with the following implications: teachers could attempt to adopt CBI when teaching grammar,extract core concepts from grammatical knowledge,construct schemata that are easy for students to understand,and design a diverse range of communicative and internalization activities so that students are able to understand,apply and internalize the conceptual knowledge to acquire the form,meaning and use of the target grammar points. |
