An Applied Study Of English Preposition IN And ON From The Perspective Of Spatial Metaphor Theory

As one English function word,preposition plays bridge and medium roles in linking constituent parts.Prepositions bring great difficulty to Chinese students for its universality and complexity of meaning.However,English teachers would ignore the teaching of preposition in class owing to the pressure and schedule.Under guidance of traditional teaching method,the teacher in class would list various meaning on the blackboard by the means of fixed expression.What's more,the students would be provided some examples to enhance their understanding and memorization.Under traditional teaching method,the meaning of English preposition and extended meaning cannot be comprehended by the students and students cannot distinguish the prepositions' different usages in different contexts.Moreover,according to the research,the acceptance level of students are not very high and students express their negative attitudes towards traditional teaching methods.The students think that traditional teaching method is boring and inefficient.In this thesis,the author uses the cognitive teaching method based on image schema and spatial metaphor to analyze prepositions IN and ON.In contrast with traditional teaching method,the author designs the classroom teaching under the instruction of cognitive teaching method.The author hopes the students can memorize and understand the relationship of prepositions' various meanings as well as different extended meanings in different contexts on the basis of the understanding of the spatial concept of spatial metaphor and cognitive understanding for the human beings' body and objective world of the image schema.It is an empirical study of prepositions IN and ON that the author tries to answer the following three questions.(1)What's the senior high school students attitudestowards the English preposition teaching in cognitive teaching methods?(2)What's effects of the teaching English preposition when the spatial metaphor and relative cognitive linguistics theories applied in prepositions teaching(3)What's suggestions about image schema and spatial metaphor's application in preposition teaching?Under the guidance of spatial metaphor and image schema theories,the author carries out a teaching experiment in Harbin Deqiang middle school in which the author chooses 120 fresh students of class one and class two in high middle school.There is no significant difference in students' English level.And class one is the control group and class two is the experimental group.Traditional teaching method is applied in control group and the cognitive teaching method based on image schema and spatial metaphor is applied in experimental group.Because of the limitations of time and space writing,only two prepositions IN and ON are selected as research subjects in this thesis.The experiment last eight weeks and the students in control group and experimental group are given post-test to testify teaching efficiency.What's more,the students of the experimental are organized to finish the questionnaires which can observe students acceptance level of cognitive teaching method based on image schema and spatial metaphor.The results of research are summarized as follow: first of all,in contrast with traditional teaching method,the cognitive teaching method based on image schema and spatial metaphor is more effective than traditional teaching method in preposition teaching.Secondly,students in experimental group in which the cognitive teaching method applied is more active than the students in control group in which the traditional teaching method is applied.Students are willing to accept cognitive teaching method.Last but not least,the image schema and spatial metaphor can help students build up semantic network of preposition and comprehend abstract meaningof prepositions.Thus the students can distinguish prepositions' various usages in different contexts.At the same time,the author of this research provides some suggestions for future research based on the limitations of this research and literature review of recent decades of preposition study and research.First of all,because of the limitations of time and space writing the author in this research only choose two prepositions which are difficult for students to distinguish and easy to make mistakes in the process of using prepositions for students.One preposition is IN and another is ON.Although the author make a detailed study on two prepositions from cognitive linguistics based on image schema and spatial metaphor and carried out a teaching experiment in high school classroom,the conclusion drawn in the study cannot represent or illustrate all prepositions.Base on the situations discussed in the thesis,the author suggests the follow scholars can carry out more empirical studies on more prepositions.What's more,the author suggest the follow scholars who can do a systematic study on preposition especially the application of corpus and try to make a unified interpretation for semantic construction of all prepositions.Besides,it seems that most of studies on preposition of the recent decades' scholars are all from cognitive linguistics perspective.There are relatively few study on prepositions from interdisciplinary subjects.In fact,there are many theories formed in mental linguistics,philosophy linguistics and language acquisition which can be applied in the prepositions' studies.So the author suggest the follow scholars can make relative researches on prepositions from interdisciplinary subjects.Thus,the follow studies can provide new implication and new teaching methods for preposition teaching.Last but not least,although the questionnaires,pretest and post-test are carefully designed by the teacher,the research unavoidably is prejudiced with personalpreference and intentions.The result of this research is successful under the influence of other factors.What's more,the students in control group also make some progress in scores to some extent.It indicates the traditional teaching method is not completely negative.Thus the author suggest the follow scholars can find new and more suitable method in preposition study.