An Experimental Study On Preposition Teaching In Junior High School Based On Image Schemata

English prepositions are polysemous.The various meanings and the flexible usages of prepositions are a great challenge for English learners.In classroom,preposition teaching has always been a difficulty for English teachers.Traditional teaching method takes the way of recitation,ignoring the relations between the various meanings of preposition.Hence,many English teachers and researchers are trying to explore the effective way of preposition teaching.Image schema,as one of the important and primary conceptions in cognitive linguistics,together with metaphor,metonymy and propositional model,constitutes human's basic cognitive model.Image schemata have the properties of abstract and embodiment.With the static and dynamic traits,they can be conveyed by diagrams.Applying image schema in preposition teaching can help English learners better understand and memorize various meanings of preposition,especially their metaphorical extension meanings.This research is based on the image schema theory.In the experiment,UP and DOWN were determined as the target prepositions.The participants were 70 students of two equal classes of QuShui junior high school.They are grade 9 with 35 students in each class.Students in the experimental group were taught by the image schema based approach.And students in the control group were taught by traditional teaching approach.The period of the whole experiment is seven weeks.A pre-test,a post-test and a questionnaire were utilized as the instruments in the study.Before the teaching experiment,a pre-test was used to check that there was no significant difference in the English proficiency between EG and CG.After the teaching experiment,a post-test was applied to prove the effectiveness of the image schema based teaching method.After the post-test,a questionnaire was carried out in the experimental group.It aims to cross verify students' understanding of the metaphorical extension meaning of prepositions,and to collect information about the popularity and impact of image schema on English preposition teaching and learning.According to the experiment,it is concluded that image schemata in teaching preposition is effective than traditional approach,especially in metaphorical extensions of prepositions.Students in the experimental group make greater progress and they are more active than the students in the control group.Therefore,teachers should continue exploring teaching methods based on the image schema theory to help students understand and use prepositions correctly.