A Study On English Preposition Teaching From Image Schema Theory

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.The concept of image schema was introduced into cognitive linguistics by Johnson and Lakoff(1987) based on Talmy’s(1983) 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 conceptualize word meanings from the conceptual origin and tell the minor differences among semantic items with image schemata. 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.Since the semantic network of prepositions are all very complex, the author takes only one preposition IN as the.case study so as to attain a deeper understanding in the field.Based on the analysis of the schematic representations of the semantics of IN, the researcher investigated the effectiveness and applicability of the employment of image schemata in EFL pedagogy by carrying out an experiment and a survey. This thesis takes120non-English majors from one university as the experiment subjects. The author divides them into two groups:control group and experimental group. At the start of the semester, the two groups take a pre-test to examine their capabilities of using preposition IN. By analyzing the results of the test, it shows that the two groups are at the same level. The following semester, the experimental group learn preposition IN with the method of image schema, while the control group still learn IN in the traditional way. At the end of the semester, the author gives a post-test and a questionnaire for the two groups.By analyzing the scores of the two. groups, the author finds that the result of the experimental group is much better than that of the control group in terms of the ability of using IN. At the same time, the experimental group students have effectively mastered the usage of other prepositions. In the survey, the subjects who received the schematic treatment were asked to fill in an attitude-related questionnaire. Therefore, from the above analysis and results, it shows that using image schema to teach preposition IN has achieved a great effect. Meanwhile, from the questionnaire, it is known that students can also accept the method of image schema. Therefore, image schema theory has a great significance for the improvement of teaching prepositions, especially IN.