An Empirical Study On Prepositions Of Locality Up And Down In Senior High School Instruction Based On Conceptual Metaphor Theory

Prepositions of locality,belonging to the particles,are deemed as very difficult issues in senior high school instruction due to their complex collocations,agile usages and diverse senses although their number is small.From the traditional semantics linguists' perspective,there is no internal relationships among the complex senses,making the teaching methods boring and single,learning method inflexible and rigid.With time going on,cognitive semantics linguists argue that the semantic network of prepositions of locality can be demonstrated by some theories,such as image schema,conceptual blending theory and conceptual metaphor theory.However,most of the cognitive studies pay more attention on theoretical level and mostly focus on feasibility analyses,ignoring the application of combining these theories with instruction practice.Because of these above defects,the empirical study focuses on the application of the conceptual metaphor theory in senior high school instruction for prepositions of locality,which lasts three months.The paper will solve the following three questions through an empirical study:(1)Do the students hold a positive attitude to the conceptual metaphor instruction for prepositions of locality ?(2)Can the conceptual metaphor instruction for prepositions of locality obviously facilitate the students' understanding and mastery of the semantic extension of prepositions of locality?(3)Can the conceptual metaphor instruction for prepositions of locality contribute to the students' long-term memory?The results of the questionnaire show that majority of the senior high school students hold a positive attitude towards the conceptual metaphor instruction for prepositions of locality but they know little about the theory.The subjects of the empirical study are the students from two classes,the experimental class and the control class.There is no difference between them according to the outcomes of the pretest(p=0.8421,p>0.05).And the only difference between them is that the control class was taught by rote while the experimental class was taught in the instruction of conceptual metaphor theory.The data of the study were processed by SPSS 17.0.Through the statistics and analyses of the post-test and the retest,another two conclusions can be drawn:(1)In the post-test,the grades of the experimental class are far higher than those of the control class(90.7196>76.4879,p=0.0342,p<0.05).That is to say,the conceptual metaphor instruction used in the experimental class has advantage over the traditional instruction used in the control class.(2)In the retest,students' grades of the control class decline more rapidly than those of the experimental class(15.8899>2.7184,p=0.0078,p<0.05).That is,the conceptual metaphor instruction for prepositions of locality can prolong the students' retention.The study proves that the teaching method based on the conceptual metaphor theory has profound implications in senior high school instruction for prepositions of locality,which will have a positive effect on the senior high school English instruction for the prepositions of locality.