An Experimental Study Of An Image Schema Theory-Based Approach To English Preposition Revision Teaching In Junior High Schools

Prepositions are one of the most active parts of speech in English,and the complexity of their usage has caused great distress to English learners.The traditional preposition teaching suggests that teachers usually present the meanings of prepositions,and then explain it with examples.However,students are still often confused by the different meanings of prepositions.This is because the traditional semantic research believes that the semantics of English spatial prepositions are arbitrary,which means there is no internal relationship among the meanings.Cognitive linguistics provides a new perspective for research on English preposition teaching,as the analysis of the semantic structure of prepositions based on the cognitive view is more theoretical,and its explanatory power is stronger.Specifically,image schema theory will shed light on preposition teaching,and plays a significant role in promoting learners' acquisition of polysemous prepositions.From the perspective of image schema theory,this article aims to analyze the semantic structure and usage of eight commonly used prepositions,that is,in,on,at,above,over,under,below,and within from junior middle school English textbooks,so as to find out the relations among the different meanings.On this basis,an experiment was carried out to test the effect of an image schema-based approach to revision of English propositions in junior high school.The experiment takes Guangzhou Huamei School,Junior 3 Class 2 and Junior3 Class 3 as the research subjects.The revision of propositions in the experimental class is based on image schema,in which idiomatic expressions of prepositions are explained reasonably by using image schema from a cognitive perspective,while in the control class,the conventional method of translation is adopted.The experiment lasts 6 weeks,aiming to answer the two specific research questions: 1)Does image schema-based instruction facilitate junior high school students' acquisition of English prepositions? 2)What do junior high students think of image schema-based instruction?The experimental results show that the teaching effect from perspective of imageschema in the experimental group is significantly better than that in the control group based on example translation teaching.The analysis of the experimental data shows that students in the experimental class made significant progress,while students in the control class did not.In addition,image schema-based revision instruction is highly accepted by the students in the experimental class.The findings have vital practical significance for preposition revision teaching in junior English class.Learners will be liberated from rote-learning,thus providing significant implications for preposition revision teaching in junior English class.