2021中国英语教学研讨会 (CELEA 2021)

 In second and foreign language education, the place of grammar instruction has been one of the longstanding issues since the late seventies. Traditional teaching methods either underscore the communicative competence and overlook the reading and writing ability, or attach great importance to the language forms, thus ignore language meaning, which may lead to the misuse of language and overgeneralization. Within the theoretical framework of construction grammar, which views constructions as the basic unit of language and language as form and meaning pairing, the present study investigates the instructional effects of constructionist approach on the learning of the English argument structure constructions by Chinese EFL students. In addition, it also explores the difference in construction production between construction-centered group and form-centered group. About eighty students will be divided into two groups and presented with either construction-centered instruction or form-centered instruction. Construction-centered instruction will focus on the constructional properties of English argument structure constructions, whereas the form-centered instruction will emphasize its syntactic composition. Before the instruction, the students will be assigned Chinese-to-English translation, guided writing, and grammaticality judgement tasks, and after the instruction, the same kind of tasks will be also given as a posttest. Expected results is that although both groups have influence in helping students learn the argument structure constructions, construction-centered instruction is more effective. In addition, there will be some differences in construction production between these two groups.