A construction grammar for the classroom

Abstract

Construction grammars (Lakoff, Women, fire and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the Mind, University of Chicago Press, 1987; Langacker, Foundations of cognitive grammar: Theoretical pre-requisites, Stanford University Press, 1987; Croft, Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective, Oxford University Press, 2001; Goldberg, Constructions at work: The nature of generalisation in language, Oxford University Press, 2006) are changing our perception of Second Language Acquisition but their impact our instruction has been muted. This article derives an applied model from the controversies surrounding such grammars. It argues for the usage based model of constructions (Stemberger and MacWhinney, Are inflected forms stored in the lexicon?, Academic Press, 1988; Croft, Radical construction grammar: Syntactic theory in typological perspective, Oxford University Press, 2001; Tomasello, Constructing a language: A usage based theory of language acquisition, Harvard University Press, 2005; Goldberg, Constructions at work: The nature of generalisation in language, Oxford University Press, 2006) already found in emergentist SLA theory (Ellis and Larsen-Freeman, Applied Linguistics 27: 558–589, 2006) and recounts an intervention where the teacher found ways to help students identify and learn such forms. It shows how exploring constructions' productivity and ensuring usage not only results in enhanced uptake but also impacts favourably upon the accuracy of written work.