Narrating The Past In Different Contexts: An Empirical Study Of Concept-Based Instruction In Middle School Tense Teaching

In the post-methodologist era,the struggle with the over-simplified “rules of thumb” during grammar lessons remains unresolved,particularly for middle school students.Amidst the miscellany of proposals,concept-based instruction(C-BI)has stood out as an approach that integrates form,meaning,and use into a materialized conceptual tool to improve students’ command of the language forms and its meaning and use.Previous research has established that C-BI is effective in improving students’ command of grammar items used out of context by providing the students with revision lessons,whereas C-BI’s effect in teaching newly-introduced grammar items in a complex context of a specific genre remains unclear.Against this backdrop,the present study is warranted.In our three-week C-BI teaching experiment,we teach two tenses to 40 eighth-graders in a Wenzhou middle school,in order to address the following questions:(1)What is the effect of C-BI on students’ use of simple past tense and present perfect tense out of context?(2)What is the effect of C-BI on students’ use of simple past tense and present perfect tense in the context of narrative discourse?The raw materials collected throughout the entire experimental cycle and the interviews are analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively,rendering the following conclusions:(1)Out of context,C-BI helps the students to pin down reference time when choosing the present perfect tense or the simple past tense.(2)Out of context,C-BI reduces the students’ uncertainty of using the present perfect tense and the simple past tense by improving their holistic conceptual knowledge.(3)In context,C-BI is capable to meet students’ needs,as revealed in the interview,for holistic conceptual knowledge to navigate complex contexts.(4)In context,C-BI encourages the students to use the newly-introduced present perfect tense and simple past tense in the complex context of the narrative genre that is conventionally taught to be written in solely past tenses,because the tense distribution has been introduced systematically to the students through C-BI as well.C-BI is not an elixir to the current grammar instruction,yet some pedagogic implications can still be offered based on the findings of the current study and further studies can be inspired to provide more insights into this area.