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On The Discourse-based English Teaching For Primary School From The Perspective Of Frame Semantics

Posted on:2013-04-16Degree:MasterType:Thesis
Country:ChinaCandidate:M Q LuoFull Text:PDF
GTID:2247330362966237Subject:English Language and Literature
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The past decade has witnessed a steadily increasing number of second languageacquisition researchers and scholars paying their attention to discourse-based Englishteaching, because it is a widely accepted truth that the linguistic study is shifting itsattention from language segments to discourse, which accounts for how to uselanguage in real situations. Although a sizable number of studies have been conductedto discuss discourse-based English teaching, they are, for one thing, from otherlinguistic approaches, such as Discourse Analysis Theory, Metaphor Theory orRelevance Theory, instead of Frame Semantics; for another, these researches arelimited to junior or senior high school English teaching or college English teaching,with little or even no tough of discourse-based English teaching for primary school. Infact, primary school students are also required to be able to produce a discourse, be itonly an English song, a daily exchange, a short story or a brief self-introduction. Atpresent, however, primary school students are often taught English with discourse orsentences that are dismembered into discrete words. Moreover, despite the teachingmaterials can be arranged in the order of words, sentences and texts under thetraditional teaching model, the three stages are only related in their transitionalrelationship but they are lacking in a system to unify them together, which makes itdifficult for primary school students to find internal relationship between languagesegments. Now that the current teaching model of primary school English cannotmeet the needs to enable primary school students to produce a discourse, it seems tobe of critical emergency to change the current teaching model of primary schoolEnglish.Frame semantics, put forward by Charles Fillmore, which lays emphasis on theinternal linguistic relevance and the significance of comprehension in using languagesfrom cognitive perspective, sheds some enlightenment to English teaching. Thus, anumber of scholars have done researches by applying Frame Semantics to Englishteaching, most of which, however, are confined to the acquisition of Englishvocabulary. In fact, Frame semantics can be put to use to account for not only wordsbut also discourse as a whole. The distinctive advantage of using Frame Semantics asa guiding principle in primary school English teaching, that is, allowing pupils tolearn English under the so-called ‘scene’ named by Fillmore, lies in that it greatly facilitates a person’s understanding.This thesis makes a bold attempt to discuss discourse-based English teaching forprimary school from the perspective of Frame semantics, probing into how toconstruct frames on the lexical, syntactic and textual levels respectively. Then theauthor, on one hand, on the basis of both Brown&Payne’s five steps in vocabularyacquisition and Qian Deming&Zhou Qingfang’s three steps in vocabulary learningand teaching, and on the other hand, with an insight to enable primary school studentsto use English as a whole, namely, an ability extended far beyond simple lexical level,puts forth a frame-and-discourse-based teaching model of primary school English,which includes three stages, namely, pre-frame stage, frame stage and post-framestage, in the hope of making primary school English teaching more systemic byintegrating vocabulary, syntax and discourse into a whole and eventually yielding amore satisfying teaching outcome. At last, a sample instructional design is made inorder to demonstrate how to apply this model to real primary school English classteaching.
Keywords/Search Tags:frame, scene, frame semantics, primary school English, aframe-and-discourse-based teaching model
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