A Study On The Application Of Image Schema Theory In Teaching Polysemous Prepositions In Senior High School

Vocabulary teaching has always been the focus of English teaching.As an important part of the ten major word classes in English,preposition teaching has always been one of the difficult tasks in the vocabulary teaching.Although the number of prepositions is limited,the semantic meaning of prepositions is complex and the phenomenon of polysemy is common.The meaning of prepositions usually varies in different contexts.However,many teachers currently teach English prepositions by presenting students with only some of the main meanings of a preposition and then ask them to practice.Students learn the polysemous prepositions by rote.This is an important reason why many students currently fail to grasp the meaning of prepositions effectively.Starting in the 1980 s,cognitive linguistics began to play an important role in language research and teaching.The development of cognitive linguistics has added a new perspective to second language acquisition.With the first introduction of the concept of "image schema" by cognitive linguists G.Lakoff and M.Johnson,the teaching of polysemous prepositions gained a new theoretical foundation.The research questions of this thesis are as follows.(1)How effective are the image schemas in improving students’ mastery of polysemous prepositions?(2)What are senior high students’ attitudes toward using image schema theory to learn polysemous prepositionsIn this study,two parallel classes,both with a class size of 30,were selected from the international department of a senior high school in Chengdu,Sichuan Province.The pre-test scores before the start of the experiment showed no significant difference in the level of preposition mastery between the students of the two classes.The experimental class adopted the teaching method of polysemous prepositions by summarizing the image schemas of prepositions,while the control class adopted the traditional teaching method based on translations.The duration of the experiment is 6 weeks.Immediately after the experiment,post-test 1 was administered to the students to test the teaching effects of the two different teaching methods.One month after the experiment,post-test 2 was administered to the students to test students’ mastery of prepositions in both classes to verify the permanence of the teaching effect.The major findings of this experiment are as follows.(1)The students in the experimental class with the image schema theory had a higher level of mastery of polysemous prepositions than the control class with the traditional teaching method.(2)The students in the experimental class had a more positive attitude toward the teaching of polysemous prepositions.The experiment shows that teaching polysemous prepositions through image schema theory can bring senior high school student positive effects.Therefore,the image schema theory can be applied to teach polysemous prepositions in senior high schools,and it can improve students’ mastery of polysemous prepositions.Although this experiment is only a case study of "on",it is also useful for the teaching of other prepositions.