An Empirical Study Of The Relationship Between Orientational Metaphor And English Preposition Conceptual Fluency In Junior Middle School Students

Preposition is the ligament of the joint which is used most frequently in English. Its abstractness makes Chinese students puzzled, and its complexity makes teachers perplexed to tackle. The traditional English teaching method of the prepositions is boring and inefficient. For decades, the teaching atmosphere has been in the plight which is time-consuming, inefficient and undesirable. How to improve the students’conceptual fluency is the goal of the experts in the new century. However, the limitation of the teachers’ theory confines the completion of this task. Having been familiar with the theory of conceptual fluency, conceptual metonymy and orientational metaphor, I have a new idea to adopt a new mode to efficiently improve the students’ conceptual fluency by means of the conceptual schema in orientational metaphor. The efficiency of orientational metaphor in teaching prepositions is to be probed into, which is of great significance in research.Therefore, I apply this theory to the curriculum innovatively, devising every procedure deliberately. In the course of the research, I compare the two paralleled B classes in my ninth grade during the two months, in order to get a qualitative and quantitive conclusion in the form of data and questionnaire by using empirical study and SPSS software to address two questions:1. Can the teaching method of orientational metaphor efficiently improve junior middle school students’preposition conceptual fluency?2. Learn the students’ opinions and reflections on orientational metaphor teaching method. It encompasses three aspects as follows:1) Is the teaching method of originality? 2) Is the method accessible to junior middle school students? 3) Can they easily deal with test points in examination to senior middle school?With the requisition of no distinct differences in the pre-test results of controlled class 208 and experimental class 210, I respectively conducted the traditional and orientational teaching method for two months. After that, the post-test results of both two classes increased. The grade of Class 208 is 77.54 points, while the one in Class 210 is 80.92 points. Two items is distinctly different from each other by means of independent t-test. Qualitative research shows the students are interested in orientational metaphor teaching method, understand the origination of prepostions collocation better and improve the abilities of confronting the examination to senior middle school.All in all, the consequence of the experiment proves the proposition theory that conceptual metaphor can be taught and learned. The experiment exerts some influence on enriching the research data of the bond between orientational metaphor and prepostions.