| The polysemy of English prepositions is one of the dominating factors that hinder Chinese EFL learners from mastering prepositions.Traditional English preposition teaching mainly focuses on the explanations of the seemingly discrete meanings of English prepositions by translating sentences,and learners memorize the meanings by rote,which leads to the fact that they fail to draw connections between different meanings and often mix up the prepositions with the same Chinese characters.Cognitive linguists believe that multiple meanings of prepositions are systematically related to each other,and image schema is an important cognitive mechanism for meaning extension.The application of image schema provides a new CL-based method for English preposition teaching,serving to offer learners the cognitive scaffold.However,the practical application of image schema in English preposition teaching in China is still in the exploratory stage,and previous empirical studies have shown inconsistent teaching effects.To further investigate the effects of image-schemabased instruction,this empirical study compared the image-schema-based instruction(ISBI)with traditional translation-based instruction(TBI).Given the usefulness and semantic complexity of the preposition over and the fact that a large number of researchers have conducted detailed cognitive analyses of its semantics,this study takes the preposition over as the target word.The two research questions are as follows:1.What are the effects of ISBI and TBI on Chinese EFL high school students’ comprehension and production of the preposition over? Which teaching method is more effective?2.What are the effects of ISBI and TBI on Chinese EFL high school students’ longterm retention of the preposition over? Which teaching method is more effective?The participants were 115 high school students from two intact classes in a middle school in Zhaotong City,Yunnan Province.They were randomly divided into two groups: the image schema-based instruction group and the translation-based instruction group.The image-schema-based instruction guides students to focus on the core meaning of the preposition and abstract the image schema representations of different senses and presents the explanation of image schema and semantic extension process.The translation-based instruction guides students to learn multiple senses of the preposition one by one by focusing on the Chinese translations of English prepositions in context.After the teaching experiment,two kinds of tests were used to test the learner’s knowledge of over: the acceptability judgment test and the production test.Both groups took a pretest,an immediate posttest,and a20-day delayed posttest.The results showed that: first,both teaching methods had positive effects on learners’ understanding and production of the preposition over,but ISBI showed significant advantages over TBI in facilitating learners’ comprehension of the semantics of the English preposition,but not in their production of the English preposition.Second,ISBI showed more durable effects on learners’ learning gains in terms of receptive knowledge and productive knowledge.These results provide a useful reference for the integration of image schema into English classrooms and suggest that teachers use image schema to promote students’ deep understanding and long-term retention of the semantics of prepositions.Meanwhile,this study provides more detailed and in-depth research inspiration for future research about the application of image schema in preposition teaching. |
