A Research On ES Model Of Subject-verb Agreement In EFL Classroom From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

The subject-verb agreement structure is a basic and important grammatical structure in English learning.Subject-verb agreement means that the subject and the verb must be consistent in terms of the person and the number in English sentences.Regarding how to teach this grammatical point effectively,many scholars in China and abroad have conducted a lot of research based on the three principles of the subject-verb agreement proposed by Quirk and Leech(1985),which is,grammatical concord,notional concord and proximity concord.However,the changes in the subject-verb agreement are complex and diverse.In the actual teaching practice,many instances cannot match the three principles properly,which make students feel confused and difficult to handle the rules.Based on these problems,this paper invited two classes from Chongqing Second Foreign Language School as the control group and the experimental group respectively.By using the experimental research,from the cognitive linguistic perspective,one model named ECM-Salience model(Later abbreviated as ES model)was built,which based on the Event-domain Cognitive Model and the salience theory,to test the teaching effect of this model and compare it with the traditional teaching method.The whole experiment lasted for six weeks,including pre-test,teaching implementation,post-test and questionnaire survey.After analyzing the experimental data by using the SPSS 16.0 software,the results show that the experimental group,which used the ES model teaching method was significantly better than the results of the control group where the traditional teaching method was used.Moreover,from the questionnaire,it can be also known that that most students had positive attitudes towards the ES teaching model.Although the sample size and the experimental time were limited,it still can be confirmed that,to some degree,the teaching method based on the ES model can be more effective to help students master the rules of the subject-verb agreement,improve test scores,cultivate students’ internal learning motivation and increase students’ learning interests as well.