A Study On Teaching Of English Orientation Prepositions Based On Path Schema

According to The English Curriculum Standards for Senior High Schools(Revised Edition 2020)clearly states students need not only to memorize vocabulary,but also to be able to use the vocabulary they have learned flexibly,so vocabulary teaching plays an important role in the whole teaching procedures.However,there are still some problems in teaching English vocabulary in senior high school.Since the1980 s,fruitful research achievements have been made in the field of cognitive linguistics,especially in the aspects of metaphor and polysemy.The development of cognitive linguistics provides a new research direction for vocabulary teaching.Lakoff and Johnson put forward the concept of "image schema",which provides good theoretical support for the study of English lexicology.Path schema is a specific form of image schema,which can directly represent the spatial and positional relations between the subject.The author chose a senior high school in H City to conduct a three-month experiment,and selected two classes as the subjects of the study.The prototypical meaning is the most basic meaning of orientation prepositions in English,which is used to describe the spatial relationship between two objects;the extended meaning is the extension of the meaning of orientation prepositions in English,which has different meanings in different contexts.In the teaching process,we mainly focus on“on”,“over”,“under”,“below” and “beneath”,which are the more common orientation prepositions,the teaching will teach their prototypical and extended meanings respectively.This study focuses on the following two questions: 1.How can the teaching of English orientation prepositions based on the path schema promote students’ interest in learning? 2.How can the teaching of English orientation prepositions based on the path schema be applied effectively?Through the reading of related literature,the questionnaire survey before the experiment,the three tests of English orientation prepositions,the interview records after the experiment,as well as the teaching examples of English orientation prepositions and the SPSS data analysis,the use of the path schema in teaching the prototypical meaning of English orientation prepositions have a facilitating effect and practical significance.By comparing the relevant data,the acquisition of the prototypical meaning based on the path schema has been steadily increasing,while the acquisition of the extended meaning has slowly started to decline,and the passing rate of the prototypical meaning is a good indication that the path schema is conducive to promoting the acquisition of the orientation preposition.The experimental data of this study had shown that path schema had a positive impact on the teaching of English prepositions,and students’ understanding of English prepositions became deeper and their use became more rational.Although this study only focuses on a few key English orientation prepositions,the path schema has some implications for the acquisition of other English prepositions.