Effects of Construction-Grammar-Based Instruction on the Learning of English Verb-Particle Constructions by Korean Middle School Students

Abstract

In construction grammar, English verb-particle constructions (VPCs) are form-meaning pairings and inherit their formal and functional properties from major English argument structure constructions (ASCs) such as caused-motion and transitive resultative (Goldberg, 2015). The present study explored construction-based instruction of VPCs to Korean middle school students, and assessed its educational effectiveness. The effectiveness of construction-based instruction was compared with that of particle-centered and lexical instruction. Students were divided into three instruction groups: a construction-based instruction group (CG), a particle-centered instruction group (PG), and a lexical instruction group (LG). All the groups participated in twelve lessons and three testing sessions, i.e., a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a delayed posttest. Each test session administered four tasks: sentence completion, scene description, grammaticality judgment, and sentence sorting. The former two tested the production of VPCs, while the latter two examined the knowledge of ASCs. Results of the tasks revealed that the construction-based instruction was more effective in improving the correct production of VPCs than the other two types of instruction. More specifically, the learners in CG showed significant improvements in their use of figurative VPCs, which are known to be more difficult than literal VPCs. Moreover, the learners in CG showed greater mean increases for uninstructed VPCs than those in PG and LG. Another significant finding of the present study is that the construction-based instruction improved the learners knowledge of ASCs, especially marked ones such as transitive resultative and caused-motion. After the construction-based instruction, the learners in CG became better at identifying ASC-related errors. Moreover, their interpretation of English sentences improved as they became less dependent on matrix verbs and more dependent on constructional knowledge in sentence comprehension tasks. These findings show that construction-based instruction can help Korean middle school students learn complex structures such as figurative VPCs and marked ASCs, suggesting important pedagogical implications for principled and effective foreign language learning and teaching.