College Students’ Acquisition Of English Prepositions Based On LCCM Theory

There is a limited number of prepositions in English. However, English prepositions have abundant meanings, and their collocations and usages are flexible as well as complicated. This has largely made English prepositions one of the difficulties for language learners. Traditional linguistics neglects the sense relation of prepositions. Directed by this view, the traditional instruction of prepositions is carried out mainly through presenting example sentences and memorizing by rote.The effectiveness of traditional instruction of prepositions has yet to be improved.Cognitive linguists investigate the polysemy and the sense relation of prepositions from the perspective of human cognition. Their studies have brought some new ideas to the acquisition and instruction of prepositions. This study is conducted on the basis of Lexical Concepts and Cognitive Models(LCCM) Theory proposed by Evans(2009), and is also theoretically supported by the theory of Image Schema and Conceptual Metaphor. The study attempts to apply the LCCM Theory on Chinese college students’ acquisition of English prepositions with the purpose of investigating the effectiveness and the feasibility of LCCM-based instruction of English prepositions.This study intends to answer these two questions: 1) Compared with the traditional instruction, can the LCCM-based instruction improve college students’ acquisition of English prepositions? 2) Can the LCCM-based instruction prolong college students’ retention of English prepositions?The target forms of this study are IN, ON, and AT which are highly frequently used spatial prepositions in English. From metaphorical senses of target forms, the author selects the “state” sense as the main content of instruction. Participants of this experiment are 60 non-English major students from Inner Mongolia University of Science & Technology. Through random sampling, the 60 participants are separated into two groups, namely the control group and the experimental group. Participants in CG receive the traditional instruction of prepositions and those in EG receive theLCCM-based instruction of prepositions. In this study, LCCM-based instruction is conducted mainly through enhancing learners’ perception of prepositions’ sense relations by utilizing the shared parameters of lexical concepts. After the experimental treatment, two groups of participants take part in the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test.Major findings of this study are: 1) The LCCM-based instruction more significantly improves college students’ acquisition of prepositions than the traditional instruction. 2) Compared with the traditional instruction, the LCCM-based instruction more significantly promotes college students’ short-term memory as well as long term-memory of prepositions.The study proves that the LCCM-based instruction of prepositions is effective as well as feasible and that it can diversify the approaches to the instruction and acquisition of English prepositions.