Embodied Features Of Prepositions And The Preposition’s Cognitive Teaching Approach

Preposition is a direct representation of space in English vocabulary, fewer innumber, simple in form, but it has complex semantic relations. Thus it has been adifficulty in English learning and teaching. Which method to teach prepositions becomesa hot topic in English teaching. The traditional semantic studies neglect the internal logicof the preposition meanings, which leads to the traditional preposition teaching methodsto list the various meanings of the prepositions, supplemented by example explanations.With the development of cognitive linguistics, cognitive linguists have explained basedon man’s cognitive experience the evolution of the meanings of the preposition. But moststudies have focused on the theoretical point, ignoring a combination of theory andteaching practice application level. Accordingly, based on the support of cognitivelinguistics rationale the author tries to generalize a cognitive teaching method, and byexperiment to test the effectiveness and acceptance of the teaching method.The thesis sets in as an example to do case studies by way of tests andquestionnaires. The author selected two classes of Yan’an University Affiliated HighSchool senior grade, the traditional preposition teaching method for control group andcognitive preposition teaching method for experimental group. It is verified bycomparing the test scores of two classes that the cognitive-based teaching method is morehelpful for students’ understanding and using prepositions. Meanwhile, students fromexperimental class hold a positive attitude towards the cognitive preposition pedagogy tobe used in future teaching practice.The thesis consists of seven chapters, the first chapter describes the background,purpose and significance of the study; the second chapter is the literature review, anoverview of traditional preposition teaching methods and teaching methods based on the theory of cognitive linguistics; the chapter three is the theoretical basis, includinglanguage embodied cognition theory, the theory of metaphor and image schema theory;the chapter four is an example of empirical research; the fifth chapter is data analysis anddiscussion; the sixth chapter analyses the embodied features of prepositions and tries togeneralize the teaching method based on embodied cognition; the last chapter concludesthe main findings of the paper as well as its innovations, and also raised the inadequaciesof the study.