Experimental Study Of Effects Of Image-Schema Based Approach On English Preposition Learning Of Senior High Students

The English preposition as one kind of polysemous words is abstract and complex, which is rather difficult to fully grasp the meanings not only for the beginners, but also for the advanced learners. Therefore, the English preposition has always been the focus of attention of scholars and an important research topic in the SLA. The traditional teaching holds that there is no rule for English preposition teaching, so that most teachers advocate students learning the various meanings of prepositions and their complex collocation by rote. The cognitive linguistics theory, as a useful complement to the traditional preposition teaching, provides a new way for the teaching of prepositions. Image schemas are formed on the basis of perception and physical experience of the real world. Since human beings can map them to the abstract concepts, they can be used to demonstrate the relations between abstract terms. So image schemas can help learners have a better understanding and memory of the basic structures of prepositions, senses of elaborations and senses of metaphorical extensions. At the same time, using image schemas can avoid the negative transfer from mother tongue.This article is based on the image schema theory and introduces a variety of preposition meanings to learners from the perspective of cognitive linguistics so as to explore the teaching effect of image-schema based preposition teaching approach. The author did an experimental research on it. According to the students’ English scores in the Senior High School Entrance Examination, the author selected two classes from Dongjiang Senior High School affiliated to Guangzhou University, a total of 102 students as subjects. One of the two classes was taught by the traditional rote approach, and the other class was adopted the image-schema based preposition teaching approach. Due to the limited space and energy, the author determined ON and OVER as the target prepositions which are easily misused by Chinese students. After ensuring there was no significant difference between two groups, the writer, as the teacher, implemented two different preposition teaching approaches in two classes within a period of 5 weeks. Finally, the two classes had a post-test on their preposition levels, and some of the students in the experimental group were interviewed. The purpose of this study is to explore how to use image schema to help students better discriminate the confused prepositions and promote the effect of preposition learning by combining qualitative and quantitative methods.The results of the study reveal the following findings:(1) both the control group taught by the traditional teaching method and the experimental group by imageschema based preposition teaching approach have achieved more or less progress on distinguishing two target prepositions ON and OVER. But the Independent Sample Ttest data show that the progress of the experimental group was significantly greater than that of the control group;(2) compared with the traditional mechanical rote learning, the preposition teaching approach based on image schemas can better promote the learning of prepositions;(3) students in the experimental group are more active and willing to participate in the classroom interaction. Besides, we can also get some pedagogical implications: Teachers should combine image-schema based approach with traditional rote approach to help students form the preposition meaning network and promote them to study prepositions in a high-efficient way. And imageschema based teaching approach can be extended to many other aspects of English teaching.