An Empirical Study On English Preposition Teaching Validity From The Perspective Of Image Schema

The number of English prepositions is quite small but their senses are abundant. It is the most polysemous words no matter what language is (Taylor, J.1995). Thanks to the complexity of their collocation and flexibility, people can use prepositions to express both concrete spatial meaning and abstract complicated relation between numerous things in the world. Due to the different cognitive modes and cultural background, many Chinese students complain it is difficult to grasp the meanings and usage of prepositions. Not only the students, but also most of the teachers have no effective solution to preposition acquisition. More attention is paid to summarizing and learning prepositions collocation but neglects the internal relationships among the meanings themselves.Image schema stems from cognitive linguistics. Its development promotes learning and teaching of prepositions. Image schema is a recurring dynamic pattern of our perceptual interactions and motor programs that gives coherence and structure to our experience (Johnson,1987). Various senses of a preposition are extended from its prototypical sense to non-prototypical sense to form a radial network. The semantic extension of prepositions is finished through image schema. The process maps the image-schematic structure of the domain of space onto that of a non-spatial target domain(蓝纯,1999:56). Because of such function, image schema plays an important role in the process of interpreting semantic network of prepositions. Taking advantage of image schema, the thesis aims to simplify the understanding of prepositions and arouse students’ interest to improve students’competence on retention and non-prototypical senses of preposition. In the experiment, gender factors that may affect subjects’achievements will be considered to supplement the research question one. In the experiment, semantic network of to is to built by the students themselves under the guidance of image schema. This research tries to answer the following questions:1) Can image schema facilitate students English propositions learning, especially the non-typical sense and retention? 2) Due to different competence in image understanding, are there any differences in the achievements of the male and female subjects in every stage of image schema teaching?3) Can the students build the image schema of to by their own semantic network after learning image schema?70subjects of the research are from two classes of non English majors in Ningxia University. Both of control group and experiment group with image schema have35subjects respectively. During the whole term, both experiment group and control group experience pre-test, mid-test and post-test with test papers. The paper is to be completed in30minutes, of which the total score is50with50gap-fillings. The objective of the test is to compare the changes of the two groups of subjects in three period of the experiment. Besides test paper, the experiment group need do questionnaires after post-test. Besides quantitative study, the author will choose4samples from the experiment group to do interview as data of qualitative study. According to their student number and gender, the author selects the equal number of male and female in experiment group to analyze their preposition proficiency and attitude towards image schema. Taking over as example, the subjects draw their own semantic network of to with the assistance of the author.According to the experiment, it is concluded that image schema in teaching preposition is effective than traditional approach, especially in non-prototypical sense. Based on the questionnaire, male subjects have more positive attitude and better comprehension, so they gain more in non-prototypical sense in spite of lower total scores in mid-test. The situation continues to post-test, but score gap between male and female has become narrow due to non-prototypical sense. However, female gains more because of practice. The thesis supplements research data to enrich the fruits of the field.