Usage-based Grammar Teaching: The Case of Chinese Verbal Construction V-lai-V-qu

Abstract

Different from traditional pedagogical approaches, this paper primarily examined the application of the usage-based theories (Barlow & Kemmer, 2000; Bybee & Eddington, 2006; Ellis & Römer et al., 2016; Goldberg, 2006; Langacker, 1987; Lieven et al., 2003; Tomasello, 2003) to the teaching of Chinese parallel verbal construction V-lai-V-qu for learners from intermediate to advanced level. Based on corpus analysis and pedagogical proposals (Herbst, 2015; Jing-Schmidt, 2015), I summarized four general pedagogical principles and designed two different teaching patterns for this construction. In my teaching demonstration, the news was used as authentic material to situate different patterns of the construction V-lai-V-qu in different settings, meanwhile a corpus-based video script as well as corresponding practice was provided to help foreign learners gain a grasp of the construction as a form and meaning pairing. This case study generally serves as a model in the usage-based approach to the instruction of Chinese four-character constructions in the field of Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language (TCFL).

Keywords

Usage-based, V-lai-V-qu, corpus, TCFL, authentic material

How to Cite

Lu, X., (2020) “Usage-based Grammar Teaching: The Case of Chinese Verbal Construction V-lai-V-qu”, Journal of Second Language Acquisition and Teaching 26, 75-98.