Teaching English Prepositions Essay

First, let’s take a look at the prototype theory to find out its significance in cognitive linguistic field and its importance in teaching English prepositions.

1. Categorization

It is undeniable that categorization is a very fundamental cognitive skill that allows people to make sense of the world. Categories are the basic elements of human cognition; they ‘are the glue that hold our mental world together’ (Murphy, 2004). In the cognitive linguistics approach, there are three opposing views which have attempted to answer the question how human can recognize, differentiate or understand every concept, idea and object in this world. And there are two general approaches to answer this question, which are the classical view and the prototype theory.

a. Classical view

This approach suggests that categories are defined by necessary and sufficient criteria. For example, if a

2. Approaches of teaching prepositions

a. The traditional approach

Teaching prepositions has been carried out explicitly for a long time, in which students are advised to try to remember each item separately in different contexts. This turns prepositions to become a nightmare for not only beginners but also advanced learners since it provides no links or structures among meaning of prepositions. According to Lam’s study (2009), ‘trying to remember a list of individual, unrelated uses is hardly conductive to increasing learners’. This motivates ESL teachers to figure out a more effective teaching method in helping learners use prepositions properly.

b. The collocation approach

This approach could be considered as an innovative method of teaching and learning prepositions since prepositions are remembered in chunks, formulaic sequence or word co-occurrence. To illustrate this concept, a student will try to remember such phrases like depend on, look down on, or blame