The cognitive construction-grammar approach to teaching the Chinese Ba construction in a foreign language classroom

Abstract The present study introduces a novel instructional approach to teaching a Chinese construction to college students in a foreign language classroom. Based on the framework of the construction-grammar approach to language acquisition, this study tested the effect of construction-based teaching, which integrates formal and semantic aspects of language with contextually meaningful visual scenes, in Korean-speaking Chinese learners’ acquisition of the Chinese Ba construction. Two groups of Chinese learners, who were enrolled in second-semester college-level Chinese classes, received constructional (n = 33) or form-focused instruction (n = 33) for 13 weeks. Results from elicited production and grammaticality judgment tasks implemented preceding and following the instruction showed that the constructional instruction group had improvements to a greater extent than the form-focused instruction group. These findings underscore the validity of the construction-grammar approach as an effective teaching method in foreign language learning settings.