Effects Of Data-Driven Learning On Senior High School Students' Acquisition Of English Motion Event Expressions:An Empirical Study

As motion events are one of the earliest,most basic and most pervasive experiences in our lives,there have been growing and wide concerns about them in the field of linguistics.However,few research reveals how to apply the framework of motion events to enhance the acquisition of the motion event expressions in the classroom.What's more,in the field of foreign language teaching,motion events are almost absent in the course syllabus of L2 English as an explicitly addressed structure in the classroom.This hinders,therefore,the acquisition of their semantic and morphosyntactic features.Meanwhile,as a new teaching model,Data-Driven Learning(DDL)which rests on the corpora-based approach for teaching grammar,brings a new research perspective for the study of motion events.Thus,the present study attempts to test the effects DDL can have on the acquisition of motion events.Based on Talmy's linguistic typology of motion events,Slobin's Thinking for Speaking Hypothesis and the Constructivism theory,this study intends to explore the effects of DDL on Chinese senior high school students' acquisition of English motion event expressions,trying to address the following three questions:(1)What effects does Data-Driven Learning have on the use of English motion verbs for Chinese senior high school students?(2)What effects does Data-Driven Learning have on the description of background information for Chinese senior high school students?(3)What effects does Data-Driven Learning have on the event conflation for Chinese senior high school students?One hundred Grade One students were recruited from a senior high school in Hunan,who were then assigned at random to one control group and one experimental group,50 in each group.The experiment consisted of a pre-test,a teaching intervention and a post-test.The data were collected and analyzed,revealing the following results:(1)DDL had a positive effect on the production of English motion verbs.Compared with that of the control group,the number of verb tokens produced by the experimental group was not significantly different,but a significant difference could be identified in the number of verb types,especially in the use of the second-tier motion verbs.(2)DDL had no positive effect on the description of background information.The experimental group and the control group did not differ significantly,however,students in the experimental group tended to pay more attention to the ongoingness or inferred background instead of the explicit endpoints,while the control group mainly produced static background.(3)DDL had a significant effect on event conflation.Students in the experimental group could combine two or more events,applying amotion verb + path particle structure + background information,while those in the control group mainly used conjunctions to merge two events.The findings confirmed the effectiveness of the DDL for motion event acquisition by Chinese senior high school students,which provided a tentative empirical proof for teaching and learning motion events.Yet the use of one single teaching method in a short time span may constrain its generalizability.