An Empirical Study Of Teaching “the+nominal”Construction

The English article is one of the most difficult points for second language learners,especially the mastery of the use of definite article.In recent years,many scholars at home and abroad have researched on the definite article from the aspects of pragmatics and semantics.The researches mainly study the use,acquisition and teaching methods of the definite article and the researches which are started from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics are relatively few.For this reason,the research in this thesis starts from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics,and focuses on using three Cognitive theories,i.e.prototype theory of categorization,autonomy-dependence theory and schema-instance theory,as its theoretical framework to do the teaching empirical research on “the+Nominal” construction.The research question is whether or not the participants taught in the Cognitive Linguistic Approach perform better than those taught in the traditional teaching method in learning “the+Nominal” construction.The research participants are sophomore English majors,and they are classified into the experiment group and the controlled group.The experiment group is taught in Cognitive Linguistic Approach,while the controlled group is taught in the traditional teaching method.The result of the research shows that the performance of the experiment group is superior to the controlled group in learning “the+Nominal” construction.It is suggested that the English teacher could use relevant theories in Cognitive Linguistics to teach “the+Nominal” construction in the future,which can enrich the teacher's teaching methods so as to help the students to improve their learning method,combining the cognitive comprehension with learning and memorizing,and achieve the optimal memory effect.