Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background
With the development of vocabulary acquisition, more and more researchers have paidattention to prepositions. Some of them have been interested in spatial prepositions. Over theyears, there have been two main types of English spatial prepositions studies in foreigncountries. Some researchers focused on the influencing factors, like acquisition sequence,learning strategy, learning environment and critical period. For example, Mougeon et al(1979), Pavesi (1984), Schumann (1986), Becker & Carroll (1997) and Munnich (2017), etc.Other researchers focused on spatial concept of native language, the differences in spatialsemantic classification and language structure between native language and target language.Such as Ijaz (1986) who studied how to learn English prepositions “on, onto, upon, on top of,over, above” through investigating more than twenty different countries’ students based onprototype theory. These researches provided rich basic information with SLA of Englishspatial prepositions. But similar researches that take Chinese English learners as researchobject have dropped behind the development, remaining to be explored.At present, many experts and scholars at home have researched English spatialprepositions from cognitive perspective (Li Jia & Cai Jinting, 2017; Ma Shuhong, 2017; etc).In the 1990s, the advent of corpus created favorable conditions for prepositions research.Some scholars made researches on prepositions based on corpus and provided usefulinformation and valuable advice. However, domestic researches about spatial prepositions arefew in number, most of them are slight in apprehension with single preposition as objects(Peng Zhuo, 2017; Mei Bing, 2017; Zuo Shangjun, 2017; Ma Dongmei & Shang Yan, 2017,etc)In view of the domestic and foreign researches, this thesis aims at revealing the use ofEnglish spatial prepositions IN, ON, AT of Chinese college students based on image schema,spatial metaphor and corpus. Therefore, the paper will be beneficial to the improvement ofrelated studies.
……………
1.2 Significance
The native language corpus and learner corpus provide rich, conclusiveand reliable linguistic data with the contrastive analysis in SLA. Based on the relevant datacollected from the Spoken and Written English Corpus of Chinese Learners (SWECCL) andthe Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this thesis investigates the usage ofEnglish spatial prepositions of Chinese college students, including semantic arrangement anduse frequency. Through the contrastive analysis between native speakers and Chinese EFLlearners, we can better understand the use characteristics and use problems of English spatialprepositions of Chinese learners. Based on the Chinese Learner English Corpus (CLEC), thisthesis indicates the major errors of English spatial prepositions used by Chinese collegestudents and discusses the error causes. The research findings are helpful to correct themistakes and improper habits of spatial prepositions used by Chinese learners, and thereforethis study can improve English communication and guide the English teaching for ChineseEFL learners. It is full of empirical and realistic value.
……………
Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Relevant Theory of Spatial Preposit，英语论文题目，英语毕业论文
|
