A Study On The Application Of Frequency Effect On The Teaching Of English Attributive Clauses In Senior High School

When Behaviorism was prevalent in the early days,frequency had been regarded as an important part of language acquisition theory by a number of people.In recent years,the influence of Frequency Effect on second language acquisition has attracted much attention.A multitude of experts and scholars extremely support Frequency Effect,and they apply Frequency Effect into second language acquisition,language teaching and so on.In the past,most of researches described the influence of Frequency Effect on language skills,but the researches about the influence of different types of frequency on grammar teaching are quite few.Meanwhile,attributive clauses are important in grammar teaching in senior high school.Therefore,this research aims to investigate Frequency Effect on the teaching of English attributive clauses in senior high school.This thesis is based on the theory of Frequency Effect in order to explore the following questions.What is current situation of students' learning about attributive clauses in senior high school? How do different types of frequency influence the teaching about attributive clauses in senior high school? How does the teaching with Frequency Effect affect senior high students' initiative to learning attributive clauses? To explore those questions,one hundred sophomores from two parallel classes in No.3 Senior High School from Lvshunkou district in Dalian are chosen as research participants.The experiment lasts one semester,which utilizes questionnaire,pretest,post-test and interview to collect data.Finally,SPSS17 software is used to analyze the data.The results indicate that current situation of senior high students' learning about attributive clauses is not optimistic.Students cannot analyze each component in main clause and attributive clause,leading to wrong uses of relative pronouns and adverbs.Meanwhile,students do not know how to apply the grammar rules they have learnt.The results also show that the teaching with type frequency helps students remember sentence structures of attributive clauses,and the teaching with token frequency helps students to apply the sentence patterns into practice.Combining type frequency with token frequency can achieve the best effect.Test scores of students in the experimental class,who are taught with Frequency Effect,are obviously higher than the scores of students in the control class who are taught with the traditional grammar teaching method.The results of the questionnaires and interview reveal that students' initiative towards learning English attributive clauses has been raised.The investigation combines type frequency and token frequency into the teaching of attributive clauses,and it enriches the study of Frequency Effect and attributive clauses.This study will provide some references for future grammar teaching research.