A Study On Subjunctive Mood Teaching In Senior High Schools From The Perspective Of Construction Grammar

Subjunctive mood,as a key point of learning and teaching,is a difficult point for many English learners due to the lack of corresponding concepts in Chinese and the complexity of its structures.In traditional grammar teaching,subjunctive mood is usually taught in the following ways: introduction of rules,illustration of sentences,and consolidation exercises.As a result,learners tend to memorize the rules mechanically without full understanding and usage of the grammar rules.As a new cognitive theory,construction grammar comes into its play: it emphasizes the pairing of the form and function or the matching of form and meaning,thus facilitating the command of the functions and usage of Subjunctive Mood.Researches on the subjunctive mood mainly focus on the perspectives of certain grammar points,with few researches combining the theory and the usage of subjunctive mood.In the traditional teaching environment,the emphasis is on forms of the subjunctive mood,while its meaning is frequently ignored.In this sense,traditional teaching methods break the connection between form and meaning.In contrast,Construction Grammar emphasizes form-meaning pairing,as it believes that certain meaning requires certain forms,and certain forms are to express certain meanings.In other words,form and meaning are indivisible.From the perspective of construction grammar,this thesis mainly attempts to answer the following three questions:(1)What are the problems to be solved in traditional teaching of Subjunctive Mood?(2)Is Construction Grammar more effective in teaching Subjunctive Mood than the traditional teaching? If it is true,then in what aspect Construction Grammar is more effective?(3)What are the implications of Construction Grammar in grammar teaching? To answer the questions,an experiment was done among randomly selected 100 students from two classes in grade three of Nanjiao Senior High School in Shaanxi Province as subjects,with Class A as the experimental class and Class B as the control class.Class A received the construction grammar teaching and class B received traditional teaching method.The pretest results show that: there are no significant differences in their level of English proficiency between two classes.In the experiment,Class A was taught Construction Grammar,esp.the pairing of form and meaning,with the teacher helping the students form their own schema.Class B learned the subjunctive mood through related exercises.After the experiment,students in both classes were post-tested.Students in the experimental class were also requested to fill the questionnaire beforeand after the experiment.The major findings are as follows:(1)Results of interview and questionnaires show that the teaching effect of basic subjunctives are the same,indicating construction grammar is as effective as traditional teaching method in teaching basic subjunctives.(2)The results of teaching experiment show that the teaching effect of “Be-type” and “Were-type” subjunctives in experimental group is better than that in the control group based on traditional teaching method.The best effect lies in the teaching of the subjunctive of implied conditions based on the construction grammar.(3)The implications of construction grammar for grammar teaching are: Firstly,when teaching the grammatical items,teachers are advised to pay attention to their pairing of form and meaning;Secondly,when teaching the grammatical items,teachers should build students' own schema,summarizing abstract constructions from a great number of concrete constructions;Thirdly,in grammar teaching,it is advisable to encourage students to embrace the necessity and functions of inflectional changes in English as it is a hypotactic language.