Impact Of Spatial Construal On Chinese EFL Learners' Acquisition Of Locative Prepositions

L2 locative prepositions have been recognized as very difficult and challenging for most language learners to master.One important reason is that the semantic content of locative prepositions reflects humans' conceptualization of diverse spatial relationships between objects.According to Cognitive Linguistics,semantics is a mental phenomenon and the production in the course of human conceptualization.Human beings produce rudimental image schemas in virtual of body experience in the real world,and then apply these rudimental image schemas to organize abstract thinking and form our semantic construction. There are similarities and discrepancies in spatial construal among different language communities.Chinese and English belong to two different language families;their dissimilarities in spatial construal are reflected in the semantics and usage of locatives.Therefore,the study on the impact of similarities and discrepancies of spatial construal between English and Chinese on the acquisition of locative prepositions would be of help for Chinese teachers and learners alike.To achieve this research objective,we set up a hybrid analysis format of spatial construal to examine the spatial attributes of English prepositions in and on and Chinese locatives li and shang,and contrasted similarities and discrepancies of spatial construal between Chinese and English.On the basis of the analyses and comparative study,three kinds of spatial construal corresponding patterns(Correspondence,Quasi-correspondence,and Non-correspondence) were identified.Then we designed the research instruments and collected empirical data to explore the following three key research questions:(1) Do the similarities and discrepancies of spatial construal between Chinese and English exert the same influence on the acquisition of English locative prepositions by Chinese EFL learners?(2) Would the proficiency levels of Chinese EFL learners influence their acquisition of English locative prepositions?(3) What construal strategies would Chinese EFL learners use in construing the spatial scenes represented by the target locative prepositions?The study integrated both qualitative and quantitative analysis to achieve maximal reliability and minimal subjectivity.It recruited three groups of Chinese EFL learners(total number:142) that represent three levels of English proficiency.The beginning group(BL) consisted of 42 students of Junior Three in Huangshi No.16 Middle School in Hubei.The intermediate group(IL) was composed of 55 students from Huangshi No.3 Senior High School.The advanced group(AL) had 45 sophomores majoring in English in Hubei Normal University.The raw data were scored and entered into the computer to be analyzed by repeated measures ANOVA of SPSS13.0.The research results revealed: (1) Spatial construal corresponding patterns caused significant difference in the subjects' mean scores of the three types of semantics of in and on.The prepositional semantics of correspondence type was the easiest for the learners to acquire;the most difficult type was that of non-correspondence and the degree of learning difficulty of the locative semantics of quasi-correspondence fall in between these two extremes.The three types of locative semantics of in and on form the hierarchy of acquisition difficulty from the most demanding to the easiest:NC＞QC＞C.(2) The learners' proficiency levels exerted influence on the acquisition of English locative prepositions.AL performed better than BL and IL,IL better than BL,on the acquisition of English locative prepositions.In addition,AL significantly outperformed BL and IL.However,the mean score difference between IL and BL was not significant.(3) Most AL learners could construe the spatial scenes according to or almost according to target language spatial construal mechanism,while BL learners were easily confused by the discrepancies between Chinese and English ways of spatial conceptualization;in contrast to AL,BL and IL learners were more likely to use both L1 and L2 mechanisms to construe spatial scenes.The findings of the study provide both pedagogical implications and theoretical values for EFL teaching and learning in general in China.First,the comparative analyses may assist Chinese EFL learners to adjust their interlanguage spatial construal mechanism to approach to or achieve the target language spatial construal.Second,English teachers would be able to scientifically help the students correct their errors by showing students the underlying cognitive factors influencing their acquiring English locative prepositions.Third,the findings of the study will help the teachers pay much attention to the difficult and important aspects of locative preposition instruction and help students to remove the obstacles in the process of English preposition learning.