A Cognitive Approach To Learning English Prepositions Over,above,below And Under

Over the years, studies of Cognitive Linguistics have attempted a systematic study and portrayal of the semantics consistency underlying a wide range of the semantics of prepositions, and some have shed great light on teaching and learning prepositions in the target language. A number of cognitive principles such as prototype, metaphor, and image schema, etc. have been incorporated into language classrooms and proved to be beneficial for language learners.The proto-scene and principled polysemy network is a proposed cognitive approach to English prepositions since 21 century, which represents the central sense of meaning as the proto-scene and the various, extended senses associated with a given preposition as being clearly motivated by a relatively small number of principles. The main objective of this paper is to investigate the effectiveness of the principled polysemy network in ESL/EFL students'English prepositions teaching and learning and to try to find a new way of teaching English prepositions.Four groups of subjects were taken from Changchun University of Technology to participate in two experiments. English of one group is lower than the other, because they are PE Major Students; and English of the other group is a bit higher, because they are English Major Students, but they are all the freshmen. The experiment is divided into two groups respectively, one is experiment group and the other is control group. In the first experiment, the experiment group and the control group receive cognitive treatment and non-cognitive instruction in learning four prepositions over, above, below and under respectively in a 50-minute period of time; in the second experiment, two groups of students are instructed in the above-mentioned prepositions in cognitive and non-cognitive ways respectively for four consecutive weeks with about 15minutes per week. Students perform tests before and after each instruction, and experiment results are revealed through the test scores.The experiments in this paper have confirmed these arguments. The preliminary results of the experiments are reported to support the idea that the explicit knowledge of spatial experiences, the proto-scene, and the principled polysemy network as motivational factors in the target language is able to facilitate teaching and learning prepositions. The use of schematic pictures may be of great help in explicating the connections among various senses of a given preposition, and showing learners how to use their store of learned prepositional knowledge to get unfamiliar senses. Since cognitive linguistics provides a more systematic account of English prepositions compared with the traditional theories. Specifically, the paper is to examine it is more effective to apply the proto-scene, and the principled polysemy network to learning such spatial prepositions as over, above, below and under in facilitating comprehension and memorization of the extended meanings of these words in both the short and long term.It is not claimed here that other preposition teaching and learning methods, such as definition, contrast and comparison etc., are totally useless and should be replaced; rather, the point of the paper is to make it clear that, besides these methods, awareness and acquisition of the cognitive structure of preposition meanings aids teaching and learning.The second language and foreign language teaching and learning practice inspired by cognitive linguistics is still in its infancy, and a lot of the results presented here are preliminary. Further research would be required to measure the effect of the proto-scene and principled polysemy network on learners'retention of other categories of prepositions except those on vertical axis. However, it is the author's hope that this paper will help establish the cognitive linguistics model as a valuable framework for the investigation of English preposition learning and teaching, and provide the methodology for further extended research.