An Empirical Study Of An Image Schema Theory-Based Approach To Polysemous Phrasal Verbs Teaching In Senior High School

Phrasal verbs consist of verbs and particles.Acting as an important part of vocabulary,phrasal verb is a language phenomenon in English vocabulary learning with high frequency and general application.For English learners,the acquisition of phrasal verbs is very important.Due to the multiple senses,however,acquiring polysemous phrasal verbs becomes a big problem to English learners.They believe that there is no internal relationship among the multiple senses.And the acquisition of polysemy only can be obtained by rote learning or the clues in the context.However,mechanical memorization is a low-efficient and time-consuming method.In addition,inferring the certain senses through the context also has some limitations.In recent years,the researches including the polysemy and second language vocabulary acquisition have caught much attention of many domestic and foreign experts.They discovered the possibility of using metaphor,metonymy and image schema in second language teaching.Image schema,an important basic concept in cognitive linguistics,together with metaphor and metonymy,make up the human's cognitive model.Image schema is the product processed by the image in the human brain and acquired experience and information.It can embody the abstract concepts and demonstrate them by highly summarized specific images.With the static and dynamic properties,image schema also has the abstract and concrete characteristics.However,there are not many empirical researches on the teaching polysemous phrasal verbs from image schema theory.Therefore,this research aims to explore a more effective and feasible teaching method for polysemous phrasal verbs teaching and learning in a senior high school,mainly trying to answer the following three questions: 1)Can the teaching based on the image schema theory improve the acquisition of the polysemous phrasal verbs in English learning for the senior high school students? 2)What's the effect of students' short-term acquisition and long-term acquisition of target polysemous phrasal verbs by adopting image schema theory? 3)What's the effect of students' short-term acquisition and long-term acquisition of untaught polysemous phrasal verbs byadopting image schema theory?In this research the teaching material contains 12 target phrasal verbs selected from the new senior English for China students' BOOK 3 and BOOK 4.The subjects were second-grade students from two parallel classes in a high school and there are 49 students in each class.The same English teacher teaches these two classes.An Image schema theory-based approach to polysemous phrasal verbs teaching is applied to the experimental group(EG),while the traditional teaching approach is used in the control group(CG).The experiment lasts for eight weeks.In the process of the experiment,three tests(a pre-test,a delayed test and a post-test),a questionnaire and an interview are conducted.By using qualitative and quantitative research approaches for data collection,and by using SPSS 19.0 to analyze the experimental data objectively,finally this research puts forward the following findings:1.The image schema theory-based approach can help students learn polysemous phrasal verbs more effectively and correctly,especially the cognitive relationship among various meanings.The persuasive data in the delayed-test and post-test shows that the scores of the experimental group are obviously higher than those of the control group.2.Subjects' short-term acquisition and long-term acquisition to the taught polysemous phrasal verbs is better and their ability of adopting the phrasal verbs is enhanced,compared to the subjects in the control group.And the statistic of the tests indicates a significant difference between the two groups.3.The subjects in the experimental group can obviously better transfer the knowledge and predict the meanings of untaught phrasal verbs in delayed test but not post test.And the polysemous phrasal verbs learning based on image schema has the immediate effect but not lasting impact in the untaught part.Therefore,this study proves that an image schema theory-based approach to polysemous phrasal verbs teaching is practical and effective in a senior high school.Subjects can save their memory time and improve the accuracy of phrasal verbs in the process of understanding the way how each of its meaning derives.Furthermore,this new approach can stimulate the students' learning motivation and enhance students' learning initiative,but it still takes a period to cultivate students' cognitive ability.