A Study Of The Usage Of Preposition Of In High School Students' Writing And The Strategies For Improving Teaching

The amount of English prepositions is quite small,but their senses are abundant.It is the most polysemous words no matter what language is(Taylor,J.,1995).That is to say,although English prepositions are simple in form and limited in quantity,they can produce lots of different meanings which are difficult to understand and acquire when they are collocated with different words,such as verbs,nouns,adverbs,conjunctions and so on.In traditional research,most scholars thought that the collocations of English prepositions are fixed and conventional which should be memorized mechanically.While the internal relations between different semantic items of English preposition are neglected.The most common used preposition of is given a lot of attention by English experts for its collocation being more flexible,expressive and versatile.Of is the most frequently used and the most difficult to categorize its various meanings and usages in English preposition.It can be followed by nouns,pronouns,numerals,adjectives or a noun phrases,phrases,and even the word combination which is equivalent to the function as a noun.In order to facilitate acquiring how to use of-pattern,the distribution features of of-pattern and its semantic features are studied and discussed in this paper.The author takes Chinese senior high school students as research objects to investigate their use features of preposition of during learning process with native speakers as reference.The author hopes this study could provide a helpful guidance through trying to develop certain teaching strategies to improve the teaching and learning of preposition of.To be specific,the three research questions of this research are as follows:(i)Compared with native speakers,what are the distribution features of of-pattern in the writings by Chinese senior high school students?(ii)Compared with native speakers,what are the semantic features of of-pattern in the writings by Chinese senior high school students?(iii)What teaching strategies can be developed to improve the teaching and learning of preposition of?Corpus-based approach was adopted in the present study.First of all,the author sampled 300 samples and the each was marked respectively with different tags.Based on the deep analysis of samples,the research data was obtained.In order to explore the distinctive distribution features of-pattern and its semantic features,quantitative method and qualitative methods were adopted to reorganize and discuss the data to guarantee the objectivity and validness of research results.The major findings of this research are as follows:First of all,compared with the native speakers,the distinctive distribution features of of-pattern existed in the writings by Chinese senior high school students.In general,both Chinese learners and native speakers tend to use of in collocating with nouns.But there is a great difference of the frequency in terms of the usage of different patterns.To be specific,native speakers are more likely to use the type of "THE+N1+OF+N2",while the frequency used by Chinese learners is less,so,this type is underused by Chinese learners.The frequency of the type of "THE +N1(NOM)+OF+N2" is used by native speakers are much more than by Chinese learners.It illustrates that compared with native speakers,Chinese students under use these two kinds of collocates in the category of collocating with a noun.In addition,in any other categories,the frequency used by Chinese learners is more than native speakers.Secondly,compared with native speakers,the specific semantic features of preposition of existed in the writings by Chinese senior high school students:(a)"genitive meaning" is overused,which occurs frequently especially when those English words share the similar equivalent meaning in the first language,(b)"nominalization and "indicating process" are underused",under the influence of the language habit of their first language,Chinese learners get used to two language patterns which are "Subject + Predicate + Object" or its passive voice.(c)"indicating quantity" is overused,the learners are apt to using several common collocates which share the similar meaning in Chinese.Thirdly,the author tried to develop certain teaching strategies to improve the teaching and learning of of-pattern and use it as correctly as a native speaker.These three patterns need paying more attention:(1)The+nominalized noun+of+n,which substitutes for verbs or adjectives by nominalized noun.(2)The+adjective noun+of+n,which substitutes for adjectives by adjective noun.(3)The+nI+of+n2,n2 is the specific contents of n1.On the basis of the findings in this research,there are several implications for both L2 teaching and learning in China.(a)For language teaching,there is a particular way to provide language instructions,which is through classroom concordance or data-driving learning(DDL).Besides,teachers should raise their awareness of summarizing the correct pattern and semantic preference and make more efforts on co-selection to lead students to write authentic phrase and sentences like native speaker.Besides,teachers can provide authentic collocations for students,which can be chosen from a corpus,to lead the learners to figure out the collocation features and semantic preference.(b)For language learning,it is essential to develop the inductive skills of the students.