A Study On The Spatial Metaphor Of Preschool Children’s Interpersonal Relationship

Spatial metaphor is a cognitive process in which people understand and construct abstract concepts with the help of specific spatial concepts.It is one of the important cognitive ways in which people understand the world.Nowadays,researches show that spatial metaphor plays an important role in the cognitive development of abstract concepts for preschoolers,such as preschool children’s cognition of power and emotions.However,the spatial metaphor of the interpersonal relationship of preschool children has rarely been studied so far.Moreover,the current researches lack multi-dimensional exploration and application as well as multiple research methods.This study uses experimental methods,interview methods,and event sampling observation methods to investigate the status quo of the recognition,inference and daily use of within-outside and near-far spatial metaphor of preschool children’s interpersonal relationships,and adopts the paradigm of action research to try to improve the recognition,reasoning and daily use of spatial metaphors in children’s interpersonal relationships through the education and teaching of spatial metaphors in interpersonal relationships,so as to improve and promote children’s interpersonal relationships.Firstly,this research examines the development status of preschool children’s spatial metaphors of interpersonal relations.Sub-study 1 takes 90 preschool children from large,middle and small classes as the research objects,and adopt experimental method to investigate the recognition of spatial metaphors of preschool children’s interpersonal relationships.Besides,the sub-study 2 conducted a quantitative analysis of the qualitatively coded content of the interviews of 74 children who had accurately identified their behaviors at least once,in order to investigate the reasoning of the spatial metaphor of interpersonal relationships among preschool children.Sub-study 3 uses 38 children from largeclass as the research objects,using event sampling,observation methods and interview methods to investigate the daily use of spatial metaphors in children’s interpersonal relationships.Then,in response to the results of the above research and the problems found,this research adopts the paradigm of action research,combined with the influencing factors of reasoning,and designs collective teaching activities and daily immersive activities suitable for interpersonal relationship space metaphors carried out by children in large classes.Educating and teaching children in large classes in sub-study 3 through embodied activities,picture classification,reasoning stories,and games,a total of three rounds of action research were carried out before and after.Here are results of the study.Firstly,most preschool children can recognize the within-outside spatial metaphors of interpersonal relationships,as well as near-far spatial metaphors.Nearly half of the children in small classes can not recognize them,while most of the children in middle and large classes can accurately recognize them,but the recognition is not stable.Middle class is an important development period for preschoolers to recognize the spatial metaphors of interpersonal relationships.Most preschoolers are not able to make accurate inferences about spatial metaphors of interpersonal relations;middle class is an important development period for the inference of spatial metaphors of interpersonal relations;nearly half of large class children cannot reason accurately.Secondly,there are four factors influencing preschooler to reason in interpersonal spatial metaphors,such as emotion,benefit,interest and appearance.Middle and large class children refer to emotion more than small class children.Thirdly,in the practice field of kindergarten,the passive use of interpersonal spatial metaphors of preschoolers is significantly more than the active use while the negative use is significantly more than the positive use.In conclusion,through the education of interpersonal spatial metaphor,the recognition of within-outside and near-far spatial metaphors of interpersonal relationship has been further improved and consolidated,the reasoning of interpersonal relationship space metaphors has become more accurate and rich,and the active and positive use of interpersonal relationship space metaphors has been increased to improve and promote their actual interpersonal relationships.At last,Based on the discussion and analysis of the research results,the researchers put forward corresponding educational suggestions.