An Empirical Study On Teaching Of English Prepositions In Secondary Schools From The Perspective Of Cognitive Linguistics

English prepositions are classified into simple prepositions, compoundprepositions and–ing prepositions according to their structure. Meanwhile, accordingto their meaning, prepositions can also be classified into temporal prepositions,location prepositions and other phrasal prepositions. From these classifications, it canbe inferred that the English prepositions pose much difficulty for teaching and leaning.Therefore, the prepositions have attracted much attention in the academic field.For a long time, the preposition researches of structural linguists and generativetransformation grammar linguists focus on the core meanings and the collocations ofprepositions. Influenced by these researches, traditional English teaching offer noeffective guidelines to help teachers or learners. Teachers just require their students tolearn by rote the core meanings and the collocations of prepositions. Undoubtedly,this requirement helps in some way. But preposition learning means more than therote learning. Actually, like other word classes, prepositions are polysemous.Moreover, the various senses of a given preposition can be explained from thecognitive perspectives. As is know to all, the research findings of linguistics are oneof the theoretical foundations of language teaching methodology. It naturally followsthat the cognitive explanation of the senses of prepositions offers more insights intothe effective teaching and learning of prepositions.In this thesis, cognitive theories, like the image schema theory, the prototypetheory, and the conceptual metaphor theory, are employed to analyze the meanings ofprepositions and the internal relationship between the different senses of a givenpreposition. The purpose of the analysis is to explore more effective ways to teachEnglish prepositions. There are two research questions:1) Whether the analysis of thesemantic network of prepositions based on cognitive perspective can improve theteaching of English prepositions? and2) Is it more efficient to teach the Englishprepositions from the perspective of cognitive linguistics than traditional teachingmethodology? This research adopts both the qualitative and the quantitative approaches. To bespecific, there are two methods. One is the case study, in which the semanticmeanings of English prepositions are analyzed with relevant theories from cognitivelinguistics. The other is the experiment study. The effectiveness of the cognitiveteaching method for prepositions is dealt with by means of experiments. Two classes,from a secondary vocational school in Guangzhou, participated in the experiment.The subjects are at the same level in terms of their English proficiency. Theexperiment group is taught with the cognitive method, while the control group is withthe traditional method.The findings show that the subjects from the experiment group prefer thecognitive teaching method and they understand better and use more effectively thetarget prepositions than those from the control group.The research is a fruitful effort to try new ways to teach and learn Englishprepositions. The findings make it clear that the cognitive explanation of the Englishprepositions is pedagogically meaningful. Therefore, with the development ofcognitive linguistics, English teaching will benefit more.