Acquisition Of Six English Prepositions: A Cross-sectional Study On Chinese EFL Learners' Sense Development

Most previous second language vocabulary acquisition research have focused on the content words, and yet little is known about L2 learners' acquisition of function words. To gain some knowledge of this aspect, the present research investigates the senses development of six English prepositions by Chinese EFL learners at three proficiency levels (the lower-intermediate level, upper-intermediate and advanced).Eighty-two subjects are tested on two tasks: the Cloze Test / SCT and the Open-ended Task of Writing. The data from the subjects are generated through SPSS. The following findings are obtained: (1) subjects' development of English prepositional senses follows a very complex pattern, varies with the tasks the subjects perform; (2) subjects' development of prepositional senses is found to be influenced by the principle of prototypicality, with the primary sense first and better acquired across proficiency levels; subjects' explicit knowledge of the primary sense shows a generally incremental process; subjects have poor acquisition of most non-primary senses across proficiency levels; (3) subjects' awareness of sense relatedness is improved with their increasing of proficiency level. With the increase of subjects' proficiency level, more subjects believe that senses relatedness facilitate their learning of prepositional senses.Conclusions can be drawn from the findings that L2 learners' prepositional sense development is different from that of the previous studies on content words. The tasks learners face in acquiring prepositional meaning is to establish prepositional semantic network. Subjects' awareness of the sense as the primary sense and sense relatedness is crucial for their development of English prepositional s&mantic network.The implications of the present research are manifold: textbooks for beginners would do well to introduce primary senses first when presenting new words; students should realize that finding the primary sense and its meaning relationship with the other senses is a useful strategy in learning vocabulary; in teaching vocabulary knowledge, a meticulous distinction should be made in teaching word's different senses and increased attention should be paid to the elaboration of learners' concept of the word and to teaching him or her to make use of abstract sense relations.