An Empirical Study Of English Ditransitive Construction Teaching Based On Construction Grammar In Senior High Schools

Constructive grammar emphasizes the combination of form and meaning,focuses on the acquisition of constructions on the basis of generalization,which helps students to understand and learn ditransitive construction,and thus provides insights for the ditransitive construction teaching.This empirical study intends to explore the effects of English ditransitive construction teaching based on construction grammar in senior high school.This study conducts teaching based on Xu Shenghuan’s(2001)classification of ditransitive construction,which classifies into explicit-giving,implicit-giving and nongiving ditransitive construction.Research questions to be explored include:(1)What are the effects of English teaching guided by construction grammar on the learning of explicit-giving,implicit-giving and non-giving ditransitive construction?(2)What are the effects of ditransitive construction teaching based on construction grammar on students’ interests in learning?(3)How does the ditransitive construction teaching based on construction grammar affect students’ English grammar learning?From September to October 2019,the author takes the students from two classes of senior high school in certain county in Qiqihar city as the research subjects,and divides them into experimental group(EG)and control group(CG)for four months of teaching experiment research.In EG,the teaching of ditransitive construction is based on construction grammar,while traditional teaching method is used in CG.The combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods is adopted,and both classes are tested before and after the experiment.In addition,after the experiment,EG is asked to complete the questionnaire,and six students from different levels in posttest are selected for the interview.The study finds out that there is significant difference between the two groups in the learning of explicit-giving and implicit-giving ditransitive construction(P<0.05).Especially,the difference in explicit-giving ditransitive constructions learning is more obvious.While there is no significant difference between the two groups in the learning of non-giving ditransitive construction(P>0.05).English ditransitive construction teaching based on construction grammar can arouse students’ interest in English learning,and has a positive role in promoting senior high school students’ grammar learning.This study offers some implications for English grammar teaching.First,teachers should pay attention to the combination of form and meaning in ditransitive constructions teaching.Second,teachers should guide students to understand sentences’ semantic features so that students can understand the grammar structure in depth.Third,cultivate students’ cognitive ability so that students can acquire the extended senses of ditransitive constructions.This study also has some limitations,such as students who have just learned the ditransitive constructions will directly use the methods that they have learned to do the post-test,which has a certain impact on the results of the posttest.In addition,the internal factors such as interest,age and motivation of students are not taken into account,which need to be followed up.All these should be elaborated and improved in future studies.