A Study Of Middle School Students' Learning Of English Word Order From The Perspective Of Usage-Based Approach To Language

In recent decades, new models and new trends have arisen in China's foreign language education with a more extensive range of English study and more abundant research methods; yet the importance of English grammar teaching especially that of syntax has gradually been diluted. Nevertheless English is a language with strong syntax rules while our mother tongue – Chinese, to large extent, is different, particularly in sentence structures. English teachers observe that despite years of English learning and sufficient amount of language input, students still can not acquire the ability of observing, discovering and summarizing the differences between English word order and Chinese word order. While reading, they are failed by the misunderstanding of the structures and meanings of long sentences due to the differences of English word order. And while undergoing writing tasks, hindered by the negative transfer of their mother tongue, students misuse sentence structures, causing word order errors, especially the errors of the positions of modifiers, ultimately leading to a failure of writing. Thus the research focuses on the following three questions:(1) What are middle school students' major error types in English word order?(2) Can teaching of English from the perspective of usage-based approach to language facilitate middle school students' acquisition of English word order?(3) Is teaching of English from the perspective of usage-based approach to language effective in building up students' confidence in syntax learning?The study concerning English word order is based on the second language teaching theories from the perspective of usage-based approach to language, of which the basic principle is the frequency theory, adopted in this study. The research methods are as follows: The control class is only required to complete the distributed learning materials handed out by the school. The teacher is only required to explain the word order difficulties encountered in the materials while in the experimental class, in addition to the same tasks with the control group's mentioned above, students are also given more opportunities to be exposed to learning materials involving typical structures of English word order, such as some typical English trunks, as well as noun modifiers post-position, inverted sentences, clefts, etc. The target word order phenomena are repeated in high frequency in these reading and writing materials. Besides, to increase the unequal frequency of the target constructions, the students themselves can summarize the phenomena, acquire the principles and re-use them in practice. Participants in this study are the students of Class 1 and Class 2 and they are homogeneous classes. But taking into account the actual situation of the students, the experimental data of only 30 students per class are extracted for final statistics. The two extracted groups are also homogenous with the same average score in the two exams.After the experiment, the interviews and data collections, the author analyzes the relevant data and finds that the sig values of 6 out of 9 tested linguistic items are below 0.05. Hence the findings are listed as follows: 1) After a two-month high-frequency exposure to the usage of English word order, compared with the control class, the experimental class makes more significant progress in getting the hang of inversion, postposition and clefts; 2) The students' reading skills and writing skills also have been significantly enhanced, of which the difference in writing is more notable. 3) High-frequency exposure to a grammatical structure and use is of great help for grammar acquisition; 4) Analysis of results from the interviews also reflects that students show more interest and confidence in English syntax learning, especially in the differences between English and Chinese word order. According to the results of the present study, the author suggests for future English grammar teaching, the theory of frequency should be employed to facilitate the learners' acquisition in secondary school.