An Empirical Study Of CALL Of English Psych Causative Verbs By Chinese Foreign Language School Students

Psych verbs are those that are used primarily to describe states of mind or changes in states of mind. According to the argument——Experiencer is designed to subject or object, English psych verbs could be divided into SE (Subject Experiencer) and OE (Object Experiencer) verbs, the latter is also called psych causative verbs (PCVs). The typical English causativization is lexical causative. Because of differences on typology between English and Chinese as well as the mismatch of arguments and syntactic structures, PCVs are pretty hard for Chinese English learners. Some empirical studies about PCVs'learning have been done, however they are usually limited to language contrast or semantic or syntactic theories, there have little constructive advices for guiding practical teaching.Gu (1997) pointed out, the combination of English teaching and computer technology would achieve profound accomplishment in the field that traditional pedagogy could never reach. So, the thesis unites an English teaching key point——PCVs with CALL (Computer-Assisted Language Learning), and it hopes to have some breakthrough on teaching effect. The subjects are foreign language school students, who are assigned into Picture group, Instance group and Rule group respectively. The present author draws the conclusion based on the statistical data: in the case study, Instance-based CALL is the most effective type of CALL of PCVs.The thesis attempts to find out that CALL of PCVs could avoid learners'mistakes effectively, and hopes to provide a brand-new way for teaching English key points and push this fresh element to play a more important role in English teaching.