A Construction Grammar Approach To English Idioms Acquisition

As a special language phenomenon, idioms are significant components in English with rich cultural information. Idioms have their own features such as fixed structure, semantic integrity and opacity, resulting that they have become one of the most difficult aspects to master in English learning for non-native learners. For a long time, theoretical and empirical studies on idioms have attracted attention from scholars of various perspectives, such as structuralism, TG Grammar, psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics and so on. Among previous studies, only a few have explored idioms acquisition from the approach of Construction Grammar. Construction Grammar is a theoretical system based on cognitive linguistics which claims that a construction is a paring of form and meaning or function. Studies on the theory of Construction Grammar mainly stay at theoretical level both at home and abroad, while the study on idioms acquisition from the perspective of Construction Grammar has seldom been presented. Therefore, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the acquisition of English idioms in the framework of construction grammar.Inspired by Construction Grammar, this thesis adopts the constructionist approach in the teaching and learning of English idioms, aiming to testify and compare the different influence of constructionist approach and traditional approach on Chinese EFL learners’ learning of English idioms. The main research questions of this study are as following:(1) Which approach is more conducive to idioms learning, the constructionist one or the traditional one?(2) Which approach could promote the more balanced development of the two types of idioms, the constructionist one or the traditional one?The participants of this empirical study were two non-English sophomore intact classes from Shandong Agriculture and Engineering University; there were 26 students both in the experimental group and in the control group. For research question one, the constructionist approach and the traditional approach were used to the experimental group and the control group respectively. Different idioms instructive approaches were independent variables and idiom testing scores were dependent variables. For research question two, according to Cacciari and Tabossi’s classification of idioms, the 24 target idioms were classified into two types: transparent idioms and opaque idioms. So in this research question, different idiom types were independent variables and idiom testing scores were dependent variables. The data collected from the experiment was analyzed by Independent Samples T-Test and Paired Sample T-Test.The results of the study show that:(1) compared with the traditional approach, the application of the constructionist approach can produce better effects in teaching and learning of English idioms. The experiment shows that both in the post-test and delayed test, the performance of the experimental group in target idioms are better than the control group, indicating that in the process of idioms learning, the constructionist approach is more effective than the traditional one.(2) The application of the constructionist approach can help narrow the gap of performance between transparent and opaque idioms. The experiment shows that within both groups, participants acquire better learning effects in transparent idioms than in opaque ones, however, the gap of performance between two kinds of idioms is smaller within the experimental group than within the control group.The present study, which applies Construction Grammar theory to the study of second language acquisition, is a tentative attempt to combine construction grammar with applied linguistics. Meanwhile, it provides a new perspective for EFL learners to learn English idioms and yields some pedagogical implications for teaching and learning. However, the present empirical study has such limitations as a short period of experimental teaching and a small sample due to various limited conditions. It is expected that further research will remedy these limitations so that constructionist theory can shed more light on and be applied more effectively to language teaching.