A Research On Teaching English Phrasal Verb In Senior High School Based On Image Schema Theory

Native English speakers usually communicate by frequently employing phrasal verbs in their daily life.The research done by Gardner and Davies shows that there exists one phrasal verb on average in every 150 words exposed to English learners,which signifies phrasal verbs do play an important part in English.Therefore,as an English learner,acquiring English phrasal verbs proficiently not only helps him to understand the speakers’ intention,but also makes his English idiomatic.However,English learners are more likely to choose synonymous individual verbs rather than phrasal verbs in English expressions,since the grammatical construction and semantic contents of phrasal verbs are more complex than that of individual verbs.For Chinese learners of English,phrasal verb learning is also a challenge for them,and there are several reasons to account for this phenomenon.Firstly,the meanings of most phrasal verbs can’t be predicted by their verbs and particles,Secondly,a lot of phrasal verbs have more than one meaning,which increases learners’ memory burden.Thirdly,phrasal verbs exist in the Germanic language family exclusively,and this kind of cultural difference makes phrasal verb learning more difficult for Chinese English learners.Since the rise of cognitive linguistics,image schema has become a central research issue,and the application of image schemas to the teaching of English particles has provided a new angle for teaching English phrasal verbs.According tocognitive linguistics,image schemas are constantly recurring and relatively simple structures which give coherence and structure to human experience;image schemas are directly meaningful and relatively abstract conceptual representations originating from human perceptual experience and interactions with and observation of the external world.Image schemas do play an important role in human recognition.Based on the rich achievements of cognitive linguistics,this thesis analyzes the particles,which make up of phrasal verbs,through image schemas in order to help students to predict the corresponding meanings of phrasal verbs,to find out the relevance of phrasal verbs’ polysemy,and to improve the efficiency of memorizing phrasal verbs.In this research,participants are from grade two of a senior high school in Chengdu,who are divided into experimental class(32 students in total)and controlled class(34 students in total).The experimental class is consciously strengthened the employment of image schema theory in phrasal verb teaching,while the controlled class is strengthened the employment of traditional phrasal verb teaching method —translation-based instruction.Through this research,three research questions are answered: 1)What is the immediate effect on phrasal verb teaching by image-schema instruction compared with by translation-based instruction? 2)What is the prolonged effect on phrasal verb teaching by image-schema instruction compared with by translation-based instruction? 3)What are students’ attitudes towards the image-schema instruction? During the experiment,questionnaires,pretest,post-test(immediate post-test and prolonged post-test)are employed to gather data.Then independent samples test and paired samples test are performed by the SPSS software to answer the first two research questions,then factor analysis and frequency analysis are employed to analyze the data of questionnaires to answer the third question.Conclusions are gained after all the data got analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively.According to the results of data analyses,both teaching methods are helpful to teaching of phrasal verbs,but the effect on phrasal verb teaching by image-schema instruction is much better than that of translation-based instruction in terms of immediate and prolonged post-tests.In summary,participants’ abilities of memorizingphrasal verbs’ meanings,applying phrasal verbs in context,predicting and analyzing phrasal verbs’ meanings facilitated by image-schema instruction are much better than that of translation-based instruction.The questionnaires’ results show that most participants are happy to accept the image-schema instruction on phrasal verb teaching,and participants hope that this method can be employed in English classrooms for a long time.