1.1 Significance and Purpose of the thesis
English grammar is like people’s skeletons. It is the basis of English learning. Onlylearning English grammar well, people can speak English fluently, so others can understandwhat you said. For students, only learning English grammar well, they are able to work outtheir exercises and present excellent performance in different kinds of English examinations.English emphatic structure is a very difficult grammar in senior high English teaching, mainlyincluding English it-cleft sentence and English inversions. Its meaning and structure are bothhard to grasp by students. Traditional teaching approach mainly focuses on the structure of thegrammar. Teachers almost do not explain the fundamental principle and deep meaning of thegrammar, so the students are always confused what it-cleft sentence is and why Englishinversions need inverting. They face big difficulties when solving these problems and thepresent teaching approach certainly may not solve these difficulties perfectly.With the development of cognitive psychology, more and more people start to pay moreattention to the mechanism of psycholinguistic processes underlying language learning(Nunan, 1991). Johnson (1987) pointed out that language study was psycholinguistic problembecause language was the product of the brain, and psychology was the science about thebrain. As a rising star in the field of English linguistics, cognitive linguistics provides a newperspective for English language and its study. It analyzes the formation mechanism oflanguage itself from the point of view of human brain and psychology. Figure-Ground Theoryis an important theory in cognitive linguistics. The linguistic application of this theory showsthat it has a great power to explain English emphatic structure from the perspective ofcognitive linguistics. It shows much concern to the mental process of grammar teaching,which will make students form a clear picture of the fundamental principle of Englishemphatic structure. using Figure-Ground Theory to instruct English emphatic structureteaching and learning probably not only provides teachers and students with a new way ofEnglish emphatic structure teaching and learning, but also help students better grasp thisgrammar.
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1.2 Structure of the Thesis
The purpose of this thesis is to test and verify the effectiveness of applyingFigure-Ground Theory to senior high English emphatic structure teaching. In order to fulfillthe purpose, this study attempts to answer two research questions by a series of researchprocedures. Firstly, a new teaching model was built by the author based on the Figure-GroundTheory. The successful application of this new model to English emphatic structure teachingachieves the first hypothesis and answers the research question. The new teaching model isfeasible to be applied to English emphatic structure teaching. Secondly, the improvement ofperformance in the experimental class shows that the new teaching model shows studentsit-cleft sentence and English inversions more vividly and interestingly, so it can help studentsbetter and faster master English emphatic structure. Thus, the second hypothesis and researchquestion have achieved in the study. Furthermore, the author hopes that this research canprovide Chinese English teachers with a new way of teaching ，英语论文范文，英语论文范文
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