Application Research Of Syntactic Iconicity In Senior High School English Grammar Teaching

With respect to arbitrariness, iconicity is another language feature which revealsinevitable relations between language structure and structure of human experiences. Atpresent, scholars at home and abroad not only study different aspects of language(pronunciation, vocabulary, syntax, discourse and pragmatics) from the perspective oficonicity, but also explore the application of iconicity in language teaching practice. Grammarteaching is an important part of foreign language teaching, and it has become a centralconcern by teachers of English how to vividly and efficiently present grammar knowledge andenable students to understand and apply it. Iconicity emphasizes rationales and associationsbetween language form and its corresponding meaning, and therefore it is a novel andbeneficial attempt to apply this theory in English grammar teaching. The purpose of this studyis to improve the effect of high school English grammar teaching through the guidance oficonicity principles and, to a certain extent, cultivate the students’ interest in learning Englishgrammar and promote their grammatical competence.Guided by the theory of language iconicity, this research expounded the application oficonicity principles of distance iconicity, order iconicity and quantity iconicity in teaching ofEnglish grammar at syntactic level and demonstrated the application value of the syntacticiconicity theory through the experiment in senior high school English grammar teaching. Thisstudy, with91students from two parallel classes (experimental class and control class) ofGrade One in a senior high school in Zhangzhou as the objects of research, conducted aquestionnaire survey on their English grammar learning and made an experiment on Englishsyntactic iconicity teaching in the experimental class for nearly a semester. The tools used inthis research included English achievement tests, questionnaire surveys and softwareSPSS17.0for statistics and analysis of the data collected.The experiment results show that there is a significant gap in the scores of final Englishtests between the experimental class and the control class, and it is obvious that the students inthe experimental class perform much better than those in the control class in the final examination of English grammar, which fully shows a high application value of syntacticiconicity theory in high school English grammar teaching. In addition, the comparison ofquestionnaire survey results measured before and after the experiment also shows that Englishgrammar teaching under the guidance of the theory of iconicity is popular with the studentsand most students prefer to use the principles of iconicity in their learning new grammarknowledge. In senior high school English grammar teaching under the guidance of iconicitytheory, the teacher not only presents the form of grammar, but also explains the correspondingmeaning, which is beneficial in reducing the burden of students’ memory and promoting theirEnglish learning. Therefore, based on the results of this research and from the perspective ofteaching, the enlightenment and suggestions will be helpful for senior high school teachers ofEnglish in applying syntactic iconicity theory and improving their students’ Englishgrammatical competence.