A Study On The Application Of Image Schema Theory To Phrasal Verb Teaching For High School English

The phrasal verb is a vital category of the English vocabulary.It consists of a verb and an adverb,or a verb and a preposition(or verb with both adverb and preposition),and it has relatively fixed meanings.Native English speakers prefer to use a combination of verbs and particles,which makes language rich and vivid,words shallow and clear,to express an inseparable whole verb concept.Because of their flexible combinations between the main verbs and their particles,and due to their rich and subtle meanings,phrasal verbs are not easy to grasp.Since most phrasal verbs have idiomatic meanings which can not be inferred from the superficial combinations,they form a great obstacle for learners to master.Based on a careful study of the teaching approach of Rudzka-Ostyn,the present study reveals the students' problems of learning phrasal verbs and puts forward the application of image schema theory in the explanation of particle basic meanings in cognitive linguistics to the teaching of phrasal verbs.The researcher randomly selects as subjects two parallel classes in Huaibei Kai Qu high school in Anhui Province,namely,class 1 as the controlled group and class 2 as the experimental group.Before the experiment,a pre-test and a questionnaire are conducted and processed among the two groups through qualitative and quantitative analysis,with the statistic software SPSS19 so that the researcher can be well informed about the students' cognition toward phrasal verbs and image schema theory.And the experiment is not carried out until their similarities of the students' phrasal verb abilities and cognition of the image schema have been ensured.When the experiment starts,only regular teaching is provided to the controlled group.But in the experimental group,the image schema theory is brought into the class.In the teaching of phrasal verbs,the researcher guides students to use image schema knowledge,to learn and understand phrasal verbs.At the end of the study,the author carries on a post-test among the two groups,a questionnaire survey to the experimental group and an analysis to the data.The results of the experiment and analysis show that through two months of different teaching approaches,the experimental group to improve the magnitude of the increase is greater than the controlled group.Therefore,it is concluded that the application of image schema theory in cognitive linguistics to the teaching of phrasal verbs is feasible and effective in practice.