An Empirical Study On Vocational College Students' Learning English Spatial Prepositions AT-ON-IN From Cognitive Perspective

English prepositions are generally polysemous,which is one of the dominating reasons why EFL learners find them difficult to learn.The various meanings extended from English prepositions' core meaning are abstract.It seems that there is no relation between the core meaning and the extended meanings.Even advanced English learners find the learning of English prepositions a barrier.English prepositions,with simple forms,play a crucial role in linking different objects within a sentence.The traditional English teaching focuses on students' memorization of English prepositions and collocations.While,the metaphor-schema based method provides a new method for teaching English prepositions.It makes up for the deficiency of the traditional teaching method.Taking AT-ON-IN as examples,the author introduced their meanings in different domains with the help of point-line/surface-body concept with the metaphor-schema based method.A teaching experiment was launched to the freshmen in two classes from Hunan College of Information.It lasted for two months.One class was taught with traditional translation based method,named control group.Another class was taught with cognitive metaphor-schema based method,named experimental group.There are 31 effective samples in each class.There were a pre-test for students in both groups and a pre-interview for eight students randomly chosen,four in each group.After the experiment,there were a post-test for students in both groups and a post-interview for six students who made the biggest progress and the minimum progress,three for each,from the experimental group.With the help of quantitative and qualitative methodology,the author aims to answer the following three research questions:(1).What's the fact of learning English prepositional phrases for the vocational college students?(2).What's the order of learning space domain,time domain and other abstract domain of English spatial prepositions AT-ON-IN for the vocational college students?(3).What's the metaphor-schema based method's effect on learning other abstract domain of English spatial prepositions AT-ON-IN for the vocational college students?The results of the research showed that,firstly,the fact is that the vocational college students study English prepositional phrases only by memorizing their meanings as fixed collocations.They can hardly find the relations between English prepositions and prepositional phrases though they were taught with metaphor-schema based method.Secondly,affected by higher use frequency and the salience of some prepositions during teaching,the students learned time domain first,space domain second and other abstract domain last for AT-ON-IN.However,the students actually achieved the biggest improvement in space domain.Thirdly,the metaphor-schema based method is more effective than the traditional method in learning other abstract domain for AT-ON-IN.There is an improvement of 12%which is much higher than that with the traditional method.The students still found that it's the most difficult to learn other abstract domain.They were confused by the difference of spatial concepts between Chinese and English and the meaning overlap of AT-ON-IN.Besides the above results,the author still discovered some pedagogical implications.For example,English teachers should be equipped with a good knowledge of cognitive linguistics and integrate the cognitive method with the traditional translation method during the teaching process to help students learn English better.