The Effects Of Image-schema-based Instruction On The Learning Of Collocations Of Near-synonyms Among Chinese College English Students

Previous research has found that near-synonyms are very important linguistic items,but foreign language learners have difficulties in the learning of near-synonyms.Therefore,how to help foreign language learners learn near-synonyms in an effective way has been an important issue.At present,researchers find that collocates are effective in differentiating near-synonyms.Therefore,near-synonyms are better taught and learnt from the context of collocation.In recent years,progress in cognitive linguistics has made it possible to introduce a new way to learn collocations of near-synonyms,which is cognitive explicit instruction,mainly including image-schema-based instruction and conceptual metaphor and this cognitive way is deemed more effective than traditional translation-based instruction in the retention of collocations by some scholars.Besides,image-schema-based instruction has been applied in the instruction of phrasal verbs and proven its effectiveness in the learning of phrasal verbs and even shown its superiority over translation-based instruction.However,whether image-schema-based instruction is more effective than translation-based instruction in the learning of collocations of near-synonyms still needs to be further explored.Based on the image schema theory,the present study aimed to explore the relative effectiveness of image-schema-based instruction and translation-based instruction in the learning of collocations of near-synonyms.The following research questions are addressed to guide the study:(1).Do both image-schema-based instruction and translation-based instruction have effects on the learning of collocations of near-synonyms?(2).Is image-schema-based instruction more effective than translation-based instruction on the learning of collocations of near-synonyms?In the present study,60 College English students from two intact classes in one key university in Chongqing received two types of instruction treatments,namely,image-schema-based instruction and translation-based instruction.Then the present study adopted the statistical software SPSS version.22.0 to make both descriptive and referential statistical analyses of the data collected from the experiment.Two main findings of the study are summarized briefly as follows:1 Image-schema-based instruction and translation-based instruction were both effective in the learning of collocations of near-synonyms and the effects could last at least for a period of two weeks.2 Image-schema-based instruction was not significantly more effective than translation-based instruction on the immediate posttests and the delayed receptive posttest,but image-schema-based instruction,when combined with the productive translation test,showed its significant superiority on the delayed posttest.Although there are some differences in the target collocations,the findings of the present study are in line with those of several previous similar studies that have adopted the explicit instruction such as image-schema-based instruction and translation-based instruction,which have reported positive effects of both image-schema-based instruction and translation-based instruction.Nevertheless,for a variety of factors such as characteristics of the target collocations,cognitive intervening activity,participants' L1 and measurements of target collocations,the present study does not prove that image-schema-based instruction is more effective than translation-based instruction as the study of Yasuda(2010)on the immediate posttest,but only shows the significant superiority of image-schema-based instruction over translation-based instruction on the productive delayed posttest.In general,the findings of the study give further support to the application of Image Schema Theory to second vocabulary learning.Besides,the findings of the present study shed some light on instruction of collocations of near-synonyms,especially aimed at Chinese College English students.