| Motion event is a current research focus in linguistics and it becomes gradually popular in the field of Second Language Acquisition. It's difficult for Chinese EFL learners to acquire and even for advanced college students, improper formal representation of motion verbs abounds. Therefore, this study aims at testifying a new instruction for motion events and offers a practical way to improve writing on motion events. The literature review about motion events ranges from translation of different languages, comparative studies of lexicalization patterns of motion events, the conceptual framework of motion events to the acquisition of the framework, but little research reveals how to apply the framework of motion events then to enhance the motion event expressions in the classroom. As a new teaching approach, Concept-Based Instruction (CBI) brings a new research perspective for the study of motion events. There is a growing body of research abroad, while the research in domestic field is of limited quantities. Recent empirical studies about the Concept-Based Instruction (CBI) research cover the pronoun, verb collocations, tense, the subjunctive mood and understanding of construction grammar etc. This study attempts to promote learners' conceptual thinking abilities and verify pedagogy of English writing from the perspective of cognitive linguistics. In this paper, the Concept-Based Instruction is intended to testify the pedagogical influence on EFL learners' output by investigating the motion verbs production, background description and verb conflation occurred in participants' writing.The innovation of this paper is to promote a practical concept-based mode for advanced English teaching, which also supplemented the practice of Concept-Based Instruction and enriched the theoretical research of motion events. In order to validate the model, this paper carried out a teaching experiment for 5 weeks in Hunan International Economics University. The study mainly adopts the Talmy's "Figure-Motion-path-background" conceptual framework in collecting, transcoding and classifying writing corpus. Slobin's (1996) Thinking for Speaking Hypothesis is the theoretical basis for the Concept-Based Instruction in the research design and data analysis. Questions involved in this paper are based on the three levels:1) What's the effect of Concept-Based Instruction on the production of motion verbs?2) What's the effect of the Concept-Based Instruction on the use of path particles?3) What's the effect of the Concept-Based Instruction on use of background description and verb conflation?This paper uses the story "Frog, where are you?" to collect students writing data. The differences revealed in data analysis will indicate the influence of Concept-Based Instruction on EFL learners'thinking for speaking abilities, which is contributory to subsequent formal representation of motion event.The conclusion of the study shows that there is a significant difference in the output number of type and token. In the experiment group, manner of motion verbs have become more detailed and belong to the subordinate category. For the path expression, an increase in the number of prepositions and decrease of the error rate can be seen in the experiment group. Students in the experiment group pay more attention to the ongoingness or inferred background instead of the explicit endpoints. While the control group mainly produces static background in solo sentence. As for the serial events descriptions, the experiment group can combine two or more than three of the events, applying the non-infinite verbs or core verb+path particle structure, while the control group mainly used conjunctions to merge two events. After the interview with students, Concept-Based Instruction is found to be an efficient way for them to conceptualize events and enhance motion event expressions. In the end of this paper the limitations and future research is mentioned, hoping to give implications for English writing. |
PDF Full Text Request