A Study On Application Of Image Schema Theory To English Preposition Teaching In Junior High School

As an important part of English,vocabulary has always been a hard problem for students to learn English because of its complex meanings.The same is true of prepositions.Although the preposition is simple in structure,it is flexible in use and can express different meanings in different contexts.However,it is the polysemy of prepositions that creates great trouble for teachers and students.In the ordinary teaching,the teacher usually uses the translation methods,that is,the teacher lists the various meanings of the preposition,and lets the students master the usage of the preposition through the examples,ignoring the connection between the meanings of the preposition.After class,students can only memorize the meaning and usage of these prepositions by rote and doing more exercises.In the long run,students’ learning pressure is getting bigger and bigger.They cannot remember all the meanings of the preposition and even may confuse the usage of the preposition.Teachers are also distressed by the poor performance of students in preposition.Therefore,it is urgent to find an effective the prepositional teaching method.With the development of cognitive linguistics,Lakoff and Johnson put forward the theory of image schema,believing that the theory of image schema can explain complex concepts,especially abstract concepts,through simple and vivid structures,so as to help people clearly understand the conceptual meaning in their minds.As a result,many linguists began to study the prepositional teaching method based on image schema theory,and has achieved good results.They think that image schema provides a scaffold for students to learn prepositions,and students can understand the meanings of prepositions and their relationship more deeply through image schema.Taking the prepositional teaching of “in”,“on”,and “at” as an example,this paper uses the method of experiment and takes preposition discrimination as the important teaching content of this study,in order to test whether the application of image schema theory to preposition teaching can improve students’ prepositional learning efficiency.This study takes 50 students in Class A of a junior high school inH city as the object,and carries on the pre-test in this class before the experiment,and then starts a 7-week preposition teaching based on the image schema.The teacher is Ms.Y,the English teacher of Class A,and before the experiment,the author and Teacher Y discuss how to integrate image schema theory into preposition teaching,supplemented by spatial metaphor,and make the teaching plan.After the teaching section,the author carries on the post-test in the class to test the learning results.In addition,the author interviews Teacher Y and class students after the experiment to know the teacher’s(or students’)opinions and attitude towards the preposition teaching method under the guidance of image schema theory and the advantages and disadvantages of the teaching method in the actual teaching process.Based on the analysis of the pre-test and post-test,students have made significant progress in the acquisition of the three prepositions “in”,“on”,and “at”.This indicates that the teaching method of preposition under the guidance of image schema theory is beneficial to help students distinguish prepositions and improve students’ preposition learning,and the author finds that the teaching method can enhance students’ enthusiasm to learn preposition to a certain extent through the interview results.Although limited in this study,the results have some enlightenment for the future English preposition teaching.