An Experimental Study Of English Preposition Teaching In Primary School From The Perspective Of Image Schema Theory

In the English vocabulary, prepositions are the difficult ones to master, and they are a problem and a challenge for both teachers and students. The main reason is that prepositions are usually polysemous, they have many possible meanings in different contexts. In the traditional classroom, the collocation of prepositions is treated as fixed, and conventional phrases are taught with no clues given as to their meaning. This approach adopts rote memorization as the primary instruction method while using realia, pictures, videos, audios, and physical movements for assistance. This kind of teaching has the fatal defect of ignoring the relationship between the different meanings of prepositions, and it isolates the meanings as independent memory objects. When time is limited, as is usually the case in practice, and students have loads to remember, the traditional teaching model is far from efficient. Therefore, it's necessary for teachers to modify the traditional teaching model, and search for new approaches.Image schema is highly abstract and it can be widely used in forming spatial domain and abstract domain. What's more, it can provide theoretical support to interpret meanings of prepositions, and help us understand them from their origin, enabling us to discover and explain the minor semantic differences among the meanings.In this paper, the author focused on the three most common prepositions IN, ON, and AT from the Guangzhou primary school course books as case studies, and conducted a 6-week experiment in two parallel classes(89 subjects in total) and aimed to explore the application of image schema in understanding and teaching preposition, and to answer the following two questions:1. Does image-schema based teaching help students understand prepositions?2. Can image-schema based teaching help students use English prepositions correctly?This research conducted two tests: one pretest and one post-test. The results of the pretest showed that there was no significant difference between the experimental group and the control group. Then, the author continued to do the teaching experiment, which lasted for six weeks. During the six weeks, the author gave both groups lessons on prepositions IN, ON, and AT. For the experimental group, the author applied image schema to demonstrate the locations and spatial relationships of prepositions, explain their basic meaning, elaborations, and metaphorical senses, and reveal the internal semantic links among the meanings. For the control group, the author applied traditional teaching. After the experiment, the author conducted a post-test and some student interviews.The results of the post-test and the interviews showed that image-schema based teaching was the main reason for the improvement the experimental group made in the post-test. Therefore, the author drew a conclusion that image schema did assist in teaching prepositions. Therefore, teachers must continue searching for suitable methods from the perspective of image schema theory to help students understand and use prepositions correctly.