A Research On Learning The Markedness/unmarkedness Of The Adverbial Clause By Inquiry

Recent years has witnessed an upsurage of extensive investigation by researchers and educationalists into inquiry learning. They are making effort to apply inquiry learning in various fields of teaching, aimed to search for the way to alter students' learning method so that students can be autonomous learners and problem-solvers. Keith Johnson, one British language educationalist of, considers it necessary for learners, with the help of teachers, to perceive the target kanguage and discover the rules by themselves. Because of this, the author plans to explore the possible application of inquiry learning to help develop students'good sense to choose the proper form of markedness or unmarkedness when using the adverbial clause as an effort to avoid the negative transfer of Chinese into English learning.The present study begins with presenting the definition of inquiry learning and the rationale of applying inquiry learning to help students understand the markedness and unmarkedness of English. Then it reports an experiment with two groups(experimental and control one) of subjects in the same teaching curriculum. The results of the experiment show that most students in the experimental group, after one term's inquiry learning training, have enhanced their markedness/unmarkedness awareness and have improved their abilities to choose proper form of markedness/unmarkedness of the adverbial clause. It is hoped that the study on inquiring learning English will be of practical significance.