The Implication Of Image Schema Theory On Preposition Teaching

The concept of image schema was introduced into cognitive linguistics by Johnson and Lakoff based on Talmy's researches. The theory is regarded as one of the central conceptual pillars of empirical theory now. The image schema is highly abstracted and can be widely used in forming spatial domain and abstract domain. We can conceptual the word meanings from the conceptual origin and tell the minor differences among semantic items with image schemas. The paper aims at discussing how to improve English teaching using image schema theory, with the expectation of promoting English vocabulary acquisition of Chinese college students. The prepositions which are very important and difficult in English are taken as the breakthrough point and a teaching experiment is carried out in the research.The collocation of prepositions is thought to be fixed and conventional which should be remembered rigidly according to the traditional teaching notion, so that the internal connection among their semantic items and different prepositions are neglected. Both students and teachers are tired of the old acquisition method. Image schema theory is one important part of cognitive linguistics whose coming into being brings new angle of explaining semantic cognition process.Since the semantic network of prepositions are all very complex, the author takes only one preposition IN as the case study so as to make a deeper research in the field. The corpus that the thesis takes includes six dictionaries and two textbooks of English for Science and Technology. First of all, the author introduces how to specify prepositions'prototypical spatial meaning and then discusses how the original spatial meaning is extended into other semantic items whose inner relationship should be shown to the students clearly by the teacher according to the author. The semantic items are categorized into three groups according to its dimensional relation with the prototypical spatial sense. All these senses are illustrated with the innovative image schematic sketches designed by the author based on the previous study. By doing this, the author proves that image schema can simplify conceptualization process and make the understanding process simpler. One teaching experiment is carried out to prove the efficiency of teaching preposition IN with image schemas. The experiment means a lot to the improvement of preposition teaching.