A Study Of The English Tense Teaching In Junior Middle Schools From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

Due to the complexity of English tense itself and the huge difference between tense in Chinese language and that in English language as well as the over-emphasis on task-based language teaching nowadays,English tense teaching in China is far from promising and hence deserves our great attention.For a long time,tense in English has been regarded as a series of verb forms which are used to express time distinctions.Nevertheless,in reality tense is not always used for time distinctions.The inconsistency between tense and time is confusing both English teachers and learners in China.So it's the same with the teachers and the students in junior middle schools.As for the teachers,when tense is not consistent with time,it's difficult for them to explain to the students this language phenomenon.Instead,in this case the teachers tend to declare this fact as the“abnormal usage”of English tense and make the students just memorize it,which definitely confuses the students and makes them at loss about the appropriateness and flexibility of tense usage or even make mistakes repeatedly in tense.According to Cognitive Linguistic literature,tense is defined as a grammatical category which expresses time relations between the action states denoted by verbs and its reference time.This study conducted an English grammar instruction of tense-related concepts from the perspective of cognitive linguistics so as to help the students build a more comprehensive understanding of the definition and the use of English tense,clear their doubts about the definition and“special usage”of English tense in which they often make mistakes and thus avoid making mistakes repeatedly.There are two main research questions in the paper:1)whether the instruction of the tense-related concepts from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics can help both English tense learning and English tense teaching in junior middle schools in China?2)how will the application of these tense-related concepts to the English grammar teaching affect the students'English tense learning and the teachers'English tense teaching?In order to find out the answers to the research questions above,the experiment was done.The eighth graders were chosen as the research subjects and they were divided into the control class and the experimental class.The three kinds of research instruments,namely a pre-test&post-test,an interview and classroom teaching were applied.After the pre-test and the interview,a two-month tense teaching was conducted.The results are as follows:1)it's easy for the students of both EC and CC to misuse present simple,past perfect,present perfect and past simple;2)both the teachers and the students tend to be confused about some complex tenses,especially the uncommon use of the tenses;3)the students'incorrect cognition of tense mainly results from lacking teachers'proper instruction and some incorrect definitions in grammar books.However,after the tense-related concepts instruction in both EC and CC,the post-test has been done.By analyzing the data of the pre-test and the post-test of EC and CC,it's concluded that 4)the instruction of the cognitive tense-related concepts did exert positive influence on the students'English tense learning,especially their learning of the complex or confusing tenses,including present simple,past perfect,present perfect and past simple.In summary,through the cognitive tense teaching approach,the two research questions have been answered that 1)the instruction of the cognitive tense-related concepts can promote both the students'English tense learning and the teachers'English tense teaching;2)specifically speaking,the instruction can help teachers better direct students to discriminate the definitions and usages of the complex or confusing tenses,including present simple,past perfect,present perfect and past simple the 8^th grader students have learned.