Image Schema-based Teaching Of English Spatial Prepositions In Chinese Context

Prepositions, especially spatial prepositions (SP) are noted for their polysemous characteristic—small in numbers, diverse in uses. And it seems that for a certain SP, different senses may vary in difficulty of learning, which aroused the author's interest in finding reasons for this phenomenon, and consequently, the interest in looking for a way out.In order to fulfill the research targets above, first of all, the author conducted a comparative analyses between English SPs and their Chinese equivalents, through a cognitive way, with IN and ON as a case study; Then the theory of image schema is introduced in the first place, along with its possible conductiveness to English SP teaching; moreover a curriculum for classroom practices is detailed. Finally in an attempt to fulfill the designed expectation, the author conducted a 6-week experiment with two second-year classes from Xiangfan NO.1 Middle School. The treatment was a case study of IN and ON, in which the Experimental Class (EC) followed the alternative method, while the Control Class (CC) followed a conventional one. In the beginning, a pretest was administered to guarantee a close language competences on SPs of IN and ON between the two. After the experiment, a posttest was conducted and a questionnaire was delivered to EC.The result suggests that, students in EC made prominent progresses in classifying varied senses into categories of IN and ON, while the other class's performance on these sense remained almost unchanged. Therefore, it is concluded that, compared with the conventional one, the new method has improved students'performance on semantic disparate senses of IN and ON, which can also be conductive to the learning of other SPs in view of their typicality.