A Cognitive Approach To The Teaching Of English Prepositions—an Experimental Study

Though the prepositions cover a small proportion of English vocabulary, they play an important role in English utterances. The complicated usages, high frequency, rich semantic meanings and various contexts make them act as the joints of the English language. Without proper use of prepositions, the English utterances become rigid and stiff. On the other hand, the present study and teaching of the prepositions are worrying. Learning by rote is the conventional method of the preposition teaching. Due to the lack of the theoretical guidance, the teaching is usually of low efficiency. Eventually, the teaching of the prepositions has become one of the most difficult fields in College English teaching. According to a survey conducted before the experiment, most of the students complain about the low efficiency of preposition acquisition. It is necessary for us to face and solve this problem. This paper takes the preposition in and to as examples and tries to make a cognitive analysis of the prepositions under the framework of image schema, spatial metaphor, and prototype theory. The paper first makes a detailed cognitive analysis of the prototypical sense and semantic extensions of the preposition in and to, and finds out the corresponded image schemas of the senses. This discussion provides a theoretical basis for the following teaching experiment to testify the effect of cognitive approach on the preposition teaching.The thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter1describes the current situation of preposition teaching to show the significance of this study. Chapter2is the literature review. This part introduces some cognitive theories and studies at home and abroad about spatial metaphor theories and image schema theory. In the end of this part the thesis makes a detailed cognitive analysis of two prepositions, in and to. It first makes a detailed analysis of entries of senses of in and to and then identifies their prototypical senses and the metaphorical semantic extensions. At the same time, the corresponded image schemas are also diagrammed for their prototypical senses and semantic extensions so that the inner semantic relation between their senses is shown via two references, trajectors and landmarks. In the end of this chapter, semantic networks are presented. The discussion provides the theoretical basis for the teaching experiment. Chapter3is the methodology. It gives a detailed instruction to every procedure of the teaching experiment. In the experiment the conventional method is adopted in control group and the cognitive approach is adopted in experimental group. And the experiment includes three procedures, the pretest, teaching procedure and the posttest. Chapter4is the results and analysis. Through the independent samples test of the statistics collected in the experiment, it can be concluded as follows:(1) the cognitive approach has a positive effect on the preposition acquisition and teaching;(2) the cognitive approach exerts different effect on the prepositions acquisition of different semantic domains. They are listed as follows according to the sequence of salience:the prototypical domain, the domain of state, the domain of part and whole, and scale, the domain of time, and the domain of virtual space. The last chapter summarizes the study and its implications and the further studies are also pointed out.