Experimental Study Of Tough Construction Teaching Based On Construction-Chunk Approach

The difference of Tough Construction (hereafter TC for short) from other adjectiveconstructions lies in its matrix subject is coindexed with the logic object rather than the logicsubject. Experiments conducted by lots of researchers show that students can not acquire TCuntil9years old. The acquisition of TC leads to more challenge for EFL Chinese learnerswhen it compounds with other interference factors such as those from L1.Grammar-centered teaching methods such as the syntactic “subject-predicate-object”method, the semantic “agent-action-patient” method and translation method are mainly usedto instruct TC in the recent grammar teaching classrooms. These methods do make a greatdeal of contribution to the teaching of conventional sentence structures but whether they aresuitable to teach the exceptional sentence pattern TC causes a lot of doubt because theprevious literature review has showed that students could not acquire TC under these methods.To turn this embarrassing situation around, the author of this thesis attempts to applyConstruction-Chunk Approach (hereafter CCA for short) proposed by Su Danjie and LuJianming into TC teaching.Compared with the traditional methods, the research aims to examine whether theapplication of CCA can take advantages in TC teaching. The participants in two classes are allfrom Guangzhou University of Textile and Apparel College majoring in clothing design. Oneclass is selected as the control group in which the traditional grammar teaching methodscontinue to be used for TC instruction, while the other is selected as the experimental groupwhere CCA is applied. The experiment lasted three months. To avoid the influence of thecomprehensive linguistic ability on the experimental results, independent sample T-test of Level B English examination scores between two classes is conducted. The result shows thatthere is no significant difference between the two classes. Almost homogeneous in all aspects,two classes are suitable for the pedagogical experiment. Then pretests and posttests wereconducted with a self-designing TC test before and after the experiment. What the attitudes ofthe students to both methods are is also explored by questionnaire and interview afterexperiment.The findings of the research are as follows:1) the results of the two paired samplesT-tests of between the pretest scores and posttest scores of the control class and theexperimental class show that both classes had progressed significantly in their TC acquisition.2) the result of another independent sample T-test of between the control class and theexperimental class on their pre-and posttest score differences shows that the TC proficiencylevel of the experimental class progressed better than that of the control class.3) the results ofthe questionnaire and interview reveal that, with an increasing interest in English grammarunder CCA, students in the experimental class hold a positive attitude towards CCA and hopethis method can continue to be used, while most students in the control class hold anindifferent attitude towards the traditional methods and even think the traditional teachingmethods are complex and boring except a few ones who have good background knowledge ofthe traditional methods. The results conclude that CCA is better for TC teaching. And theresearcher hopes that this study can help to expand the range to improve other sentencepatterns’ acquisition in CCA to some degree.