An Empirical Study Of Chinese Senior High School Students’ Acquisition Of Ditransitive Construction From The Perspective Of Construction Grammar

Ditransitive Construction has been the focus of various linguistic schools due to its productivity and complexity that makes teaching a challenge for teachers at all levels.The traditional teaching method is mainly through grammar translation,focusing on the form but ignoring the semantics.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics,construction is the primary object of language research.A distinct construction C is a form-meaning pair <Fi,Si>.Some aspect of Fi or some aspect of Si is not strictly predictable from C’s component parts or from other previously established constructions.As the latest development of linguistics,this view provides new ideas for language teaching: The object of grammar teaching is a form-meaning combination.Since the 1980 s,construction grammar has made great progress in grammar theory and teaching research in the rise of cognitive grammar.In line with Construction Grammar proposed by Goldberg,this thesis explores the teaching effect of Construction Grammar on English Ditransitive Construction represented by six types of verbs specifically,namely actual successful transfer,obligation of transfer,intention transfer,enablement transfer,future transfer and negation of transfer.To investigate this,two research questions are addressed as follows:(1)Can construction-grammar-guided instruction help high school students better acquire ditransitive construction comparing to traditional teaching method?How?(2)How is each ditransitive verb type different from the other in terms of learning effect under Construction Grammar?In order to answer these two questions,this thesis conducted a teaching experiment with Class Six(47 students)and Class Eight(44 students)in the first grade of a high school in Xiangtan.In the experimental group,Construction Grammar was applied in class,and meanwhile,the same contents are taught in the control group in a traditional grammar teaching method.Before and after the experiment,two tests were designed to the students,and all the data were collected and analyzed in SPSS 19.0.The result shows that Construction Grammar can effectively help high school students master ditransitive construction,and there is no significant difference between two groups in students in learning the ditransitive construction indicating the successful transfer,but there are significant differences in the learning of obligation transfer,intention transfer,ability transfer,future transfer and negative transfer,and it can be easily found that the teaching effect of experimental group is more obvious.