An Empirical Research Of English Grammar Teaching In Junior High School From The Perspective Of Embodied Cognition Theory

There are three major parts to any language:pronunciation,vocabulary,and grammar.Vocabulary can be compared to the bricks for a building,while grammar is the rule of piercing the bricks together to form the building.Words pieced together at random without rules would not make a solid building.English learning and teaching cannot do without learning and teaching English grammar.For a long time,however,English grammar instruction has been moving along the traditional way of mechanically training students in abstract language symbols,without due attention paid to students’active position in the classroom.This traditional“disembodied”teaching has led to a lack of interest in learning grammar and inefficient teaching.As cognitive science has developed,the emergence of embodied cognition theory has broken the disembodied mindset,stressing that human cognition is the production of the body,the environment,and their interactive activities that are vivid and concrete.Teaching grammar from an embodied cognitive perspective can inspire teachers to teach grammar in concrete contexts and allow students to understand grammar in a bodily experiential way,which can enhance students’interest in learning and thus improve their performance in grammar.The present study,guided by the embodied cognition theory,sets out to verify the effectiveness of junior high school grammar teaching in the context of embodiment.Two parallel classes in the 8^thgrade of a junior high school in Xiamen,Fujian Province,are the subjects under discussion,with one class as the controlled class and the other as the experimental one.A three-month empirical study was conducted to investigate the following two questions:（1）Can the teaching of grammar from the perspective of embodied cognition theory increase students’learning interest?（2）What effects does embodied cognition theory have on junior high school grammar teaching in terms of students’grammatical performance?A combination of questionnaires,testing,and interviews is employed to collect data,which is then processed and analyzed with SPSS 20.0.The results are as follows:Firstly,students in the experimental class have considerably increased their interest in learning grammar than before.Secondly,the grammar grades of the experimental class have improved significantly,while the controlled class shows a slight growth.And between the two classes,there is a significant difference after the experiment.The results demonstrate that teaching grammar based on the embodied cognition theory can improve both the interest of junior high school students in learning grammar and their grammar performance.It is proved that teaching grammar from the embodied cognitive perspective is effective.The present experiment has provided a new way of English grammar instruction and is thus of practical reference.Hopefully,it will invite further studies so as to maximize its positive effects.