An Image Schematic Study On English Prepositional Polysemy

The acquisition of vocabularies is a difficult problem for the second language learners. The acquisition of prepositions becomes more difficult. To the Chinese learners, the acquisition of prepositions is the problem they are confused.Although prepositions are simple in form and limited in number, they are the most polysemous and widely used words. As for the prepositions, the traditional teaching method only concentrates on the layer recitation. During the teaching process, teachers illustrate the words then emphasizing with sentences. The students just memorize prepositions mechanically. They do not understand the interrelationship among the meanings. Their learning interests are thus deeply affected.In order to find out an efficient way in learning prepositions, cognitive linguistics is gradually paid attention to. It is proved that the senses are related to each other. Through years of studies, the researchers have proved that there will never be any isolation for prepositions; the prepositions are always connected with each other. The thesis itself aims at the exploration and discussion from the perspective of Cognitive Image Schema on Polysemic preposition. The research will be done with the help of both experiments and questionnaire. Based on the theoretical discussion and empirical findings afforded by previous scholars and reaearchers, the question is to be solved in this paper:Image schema theory is an efficient way to the teaching of English prepositional polysemy for the students, compared with the traditional method of word meaning listed. The subjects involved in the thesis are the college students from Chaoyang Training School who are specialized in English in the first year of their learning career. The two classes are taught by different ways with Image Schema being applied in the first class and the traditional way applied in the second traditional. The results will be analyzed afterwards and the two scores will be compared in order to testify the efficiency of Image Schema used during the teaching process. All the results will be analyzed with the help of questionnaires to figure out their attitudes towards the experimental method of teaching. The results will also be analyzed by SPSS. Through the studies about image schema and the application of it, the research question is tested to be true.