Sentence and Its Relationship with Cognitive Structure - Case in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language

The conventional textbooks are almost organized from a linguistic approach, i.e. in accordance with the words, sentence, and text order to teach. But this kind of teaching violates the human cognitive structure of the second language learner, and will hinder their study. The current study discusses the role of sentence in second language teaching from constructive approach. It argues that sentence as key chunk will stimulate the inner knowledge of a second language learner, and generate situation effect which matches the information process model in our brain. Comparing the conventional and cognitive teaching method, it is found that the cognitive teaching method is more effective than the conventional one.