The Effect Of An Application Of Image Schema On Senior High School Students' Acquisition Of English Verb-particle Constructions

Verb-particle constructions are generally defined as combination of a verb and an adverb,or a verb and a preposition or a verb with both adverb and preposition(Collins COBUILD Dictionary of phrasal verbs).It is known to all that verb-particle constructions are of great importance part in English learning and are often tested in college entrance examination.Generally a verb-particle construction has some extended meanings,which gives rise to some difficulties to students' memorizing all the meanings of a polysemic verb-particle construction.And most of the teachers in China tend to adopt traditional method,that is,teach verb-particle constructions by just translating it and explaining some examples.The efficiency of teaching in this way is rather low and students' interests of learning verb-particle constructions are greatly sharpened,because as a matter of fact they have not understood them essentially and by contrast they just memorize them mechanically.In order to change the status quo,to put it another way,to improve the teaching efficiency by a large margin,the author attempts to find out a better new method of teaching verb-particle constructions to replace this traditional one.And then the author conducted a sixteen-week experiment among 79 students in the two parallel classes of senior two from the No.8 senior high school in Nanchang.As for teaching verb-particle constructions,the author used image schematic method in the experimental class while still adopted the conventional method in the control class.After a-term instruction,the important and new verb-particle constructions that participants have learned during this term were designed in the post-test and the post-test which was carried out in the two classes so as to check out whether there exist differences between the two classes in acquiring verb-particle constructions.Meanwhile,the author also handed out the questionnaires to the experimental class in order to see if image schematic method can produce positive influence on students' interest and attitude in learning English verb-particle constructions.The results of the research demonstrate that:(1)Compared to conventional method,image schematic method can be more effective in facilitating senior high school students' acquisition of verb-particle constructions.(2)After the experiment,most of the students tend to take positive attitudetowards image schematic method in that the new teaching method can intrigue their interest in learning verb-particle constructions and help them develop a better understanding and deep memory.Based on the findings,some tentative implications are proposed as follows.First and the foremost,based on its positive effect,image schematic method should be applied in classroom English verb-particle teaching.Furthermore,it is suggested that teachers are supposed to attach great importance to verb-particle construction teaching and try to change their traditional teaching way into original method.So it requires that teachers should persist in continuous innovation and diligent study and enlarge their theoretical knowledge in the teaching field.Last but not least,image schematic method has not been spread yet in senior high school,for most English teachers have little knowledge about it and there is still no specialized and standard English teaching theoretical training or teaching approach guidance in senior high school.Therefore,the corresponding training for English teachers in senior high school should be carried out so as to make more English teachers learn and use original and effective method.