Experimental Study Of Teaching Preposition On To Primary School Students:From The Cognitive Linguistic Perspective

English prepositions are very necessary for English learners to learn and very important in English language teaching in China.The syllabus of Grade Five in Chengdu primary schools has clearly pointed out that prepositions are the core knowledge of English learning,which must be included in the test.Consequently,the importance of the teaching and learning of English prepositions has been emphasized in the primary school.Yet in English class,teachers tend to adopt the traditional teaching approach,ignoring the cognitive relationships among meanings of a single preposition,which causes that learners mechanically remember the meanings of English prepositions.Especially in the primary school,this leads to the fact that many language learners in primary schools hold the idea that the meanings of English prepositions are too complicated and abstract for them to understand,let alone appropriately using these prepositions.Therefore,how to make language learners in primary schools have a better understanding of prepositions and how to make learners use them in a flexible way have become an urgent task for cognitive linguists and English teachers.Cognitive Linguistics studies the polysemy of English prepositions based on the Embodied view and holds that the basic meaning of a preposition originates from the human interaction and experience of the external physical-social world.So far,some researchers previously have done some theoretical explorations of English prepositions from the perspective of Cognitive Linguistics,but most of them mainly focus on the prepositions over,through,with,in,less attention being paid to the preposition on.The experimental studies of teaching English prepositions are also involved,but the participants of the previous studies are mostly adult students,and the primary school students as the participants are relatively inadequate.Therefore,an experimental study on the teaching of the preposition on from the perspective of Cognitive linguistics is conducted in this thesis.The participants are 22 English learners in Grade Five in primary schools.More typically,these 22 English learners are divided into two groups,i.e.the experimental group and the control group.The experimental group is taught with Cognitive Linguistic approach,and the control group is taught with the traditional teaching method.There are four steps in this experimental study: pre-test,teaching process,post-test and interview.The results of the study show that:(1)In terms of learning and using the preposition on,participants in the experimental group taught with the Cognitive Linguistic approach method significantly perform better than the control group taught with the traditional teaching method,which means that the Cognitive Linguistic approach is more beneficial in helping primary school English learners better understand and appropriately use English prepositions.(2)The Cognitive Linguistic approach could promote the interest of primary school students in learning English prepositions.The implication of this experimental study is that in the teaching of prepositions,teachers could use theories of Cognitive Linguistics to guide primary school students to understand the polysemous meanings of prepositions,and help them understand the cognitive mechanisms behind the polysemy,thus improving the effectiveness of English learning.