The Application Of Concept-Based Instruction To Senior High Students’ Learning Of English Phrasal Verb V+UP

Phrasal verb,a verb plus particle construction,is an important part in college entrance examinations.Among all phrasal verbs,V+UP shares a high frequency in senior high school English teaching.A phrasal verb is usually polysemous,especially the particle in a phrasal verb,which may have even more than ten meanings,such as UP.So the teaching of phrasal verbs can be taxing.Concept-based instruction is currently the latest approach of foreign language teaching.It advocates starting from the teaching of concepts.And it requires students to learn concept first with the help of schema or models.Afterwards,based on students’ understanding,it allows students to engage in communicative activities and then voice their understanding of the concept by themselves to internalize the concept.These are also the very five stages of concept-based instruction:explanation,materialization,communicative activities,verbalization and internalization.Therefore,the study applies the concept-based instruction to the teaching of English phrasal verb V+UP in senior high schools,aiming to explore the impact of the teaching on students’ learning of three meanings of V+UP,namely spatial meaning,social meaning and mental meaning.The specific research questions are:(1)What is the effect of concept-based instruction on senior high students’ learning of the spatial meaning of V+UP?(2)What is the effect of concept-based instruction on senior high students’ learning of the social meaning of V+UP?(3)What is the effect of concept-based instruction on senior high students’ learning of the mental meaning of V+UP?This study mainly adopts the methods of quantitative research and qualitative research.The subjects are selected from the first grade of a Senior High School in Nanjing.In the quantitative study,Class 5 is the experimental class,and Class 6 is the control class.The number of students in both classes is 40.The experimental class receives phrasal verbs teaching under the guidance of concept-based instruction,while the control-class still takes the lessons based on traditional 3P teaching method.The teaching experiment lasts for 4 weeks.Both classes have participated in the pretest and post-test.The two tests are both phrasal verb tests mainly concerning V+UP.The data obtained are analyzed by SPSS,including independent sample t test and paired sample t test.In the qualitative research,six students from the experimental class are invited in the interview,and every two of them belong to the students of three(high,medium and low)grade levels in the post-test.Finally,the interview contents are transcribed into written texts for further analysis.The major findings show that:(1)For the learning of the spatial meaning of V+UP,the data indicates that there is no significant difference between EC and CC,so concept-based instruction makes little difference to the learning of spatial meaning of V+UP for senior high students.(2)For the learning of the social meaning of V+UP,students in EC achieve higher grades than students in CC,so there is a significant difference in two classes.Concept-based instruction has a significant effect on senior high students’ learning of social meaning of V+UP.The interview confirms that students in EC can internalize their knowledge after understanding concepts,mapping schema and participating in communicative activities,so as to achieve better learning results.(3)For the learning of the mental meaning of V+UP,the result of EC is better than that of CC,so concept-based instruction has a positive effect on senior high students.The interview results show that students in EC can gradually interpret the mental and even other meanings of V+UP from a cognitive perspective by virtue of concept-based instruction.The pedagogical implications of this study are as follows:(1)Concept-based instruction provides a new prospect for phrasal verbs teaching.Teachers should attach more importance to the concept itself and then explain the concept to students systematically and scientifically.(2)Teachers should cultivate students’ cognitive ability.Teachers can employ illustrative models in the teaching process to help students better understand concepts from a cognitive perspective.(3)Teachers should play the role of instructor,so that students can really take an active part in communicative activities for a deep understanding of the concept,so as to internalize what they have learned.Finally,there still exist some limitations in this study,such as short test duration and insufficient teaching time;small sample size;restricted research process.Therefore,this study needs to be further improved.