The Effect Of Image-Schema-Based Teaching On The Students’ Learning Of IN In Senior Middle School

As the functional word, prepositions are one of the indispensable word categories in English and play an important role in the structure of English. Preposition teaching is one of the difficult points in English teaching because of its flexible collocations and rich meanings. The traditional preposition teaching usually lists the various meanings of the preposition with some examples to explain, which neglects the connections between different meanings of the preposition. Such teaching method would bring about learners’ rote memorization which gains little teaching effectiveness. Image schema analyzes the internal connections between different meanings of the preposition from a brand new perspective which can be conducive to a better understanding of the words and offers a new perspective for the preposition teaching. The thesis tries to apply the theory of image schema into the preposition teaching by carrying out an empirical study in Senior Middle School to examine the effects of this proposed teaching on students’ learning of preposition IN.Based on the image schema theory, this study tries to find out the empirical answers to the following three research questions:(1) What’s the effect of image-schema-based teaching on the students’ learning of preposition IN? (2) What’s the effect of image-schema-based teaching on the students’ learning of preposition IN in terms of its spatial meanings? (3) What’s the effect of image-schema-based teaching on the students’ learning of preposition IN in terms of its extended meanings?Both quantitative and qualitative methods are adopted in this study. The quantitative research includes two test papers and the qualitative research mainly involves a semi-structured interview. Altogether 120 students in No.3 Senior Middle School are chosen as the subjects. One class is taken as the experimental group (EG) and another is the control group (CG). The result of the pretest shows that there is no significant difference between the two classes in terms of their mastery of the English prepositions. Then the teaching experiment is carried out. The image-schema-based teaching is adopted in the experimental group and the control group is still under the traditional preposition teaching. After the experiment, the data collected are processed by the SPSS 20.0 with Independent Samples T-Test and Paired Samples T-test. After the posttest, an interview is carried out among the selected subjects.The major findings can be summarized as follows:(1) As for the items that should be filled with IN in the posttest, the EG (M=14.03) perform much better than the CG (M=12.55) and there exists a significance difference between the two groups (p=0.000). In addition, the mean score of low level students in EG increases 2.86 while the high level students increases only 0.73. Therefore, the image-schema-based teaching can improve the students’, especially the low level students’learning of the preposition IN; (2) As for the items that should be filled with the spatial meanings of IN, the posttest of EG (M=7.20) is higher than the pretest of EG (M=7.02). However, there is no significance difference between the two tests (p=0.062). Furthermore, the mean score of the low level students in EG decreases 0.07 and the high level students’increases only 0.26. Thus, we can conclude that the image-schema-based teaching can not significantly facilitate the students’learning of the preposition IN in terms of its spatial meanings, and the conclusion is true for both the high level students and the low level students; (3) As for the items that should be filled with the extended meanings of IN in the posttest, the EG (M=6.83) outperformed the CG (M=5.15) and there is a significance difference between the two groups (p=0.000). Besides, the mean score of low level students in EG increases 2.93 after treatment but the mean score of high level students increases 0.47. Therefore, the image-schema-based teaching can significantly improve the students’, especially the low level students’learning of the preposition IN in terms of its extended meanings.The main pedagogical implications of the study are that:(1) The image-schema-based teaching is especially effective in the students’acquisition of the extended meanings of IN; (2) Teachers should cultivate the students’learning strategies; (3) The application of image schema provides a brand new perspective for the teaching and learning of English prepositions.Lastly, there are still some limitations in this study, such as limited preposition sample IN, short time of the experiment, the limited number of subjects, etc. Therefore, future studies are needed for further improvement.