A Blended Cognitive, Linguistic, and Vygotskian Approach for Teaching and Learning the Prepositions in, on, and of in the Advanced ESL Classroom

Abstract

Despite a plethora of new approaches in ESL writing and grammar instruction that were introduced in the twentieth century, ESL students and instructors continue to struggle with the teaching and learning of English prepositions. The members of this small class of high-frequency words are noted for their polysemy and varied contexts of uses as well as their multiple syntactic functions. This research is based on O’Dowd’s (1993) argument that a semantic unity holds for English prepositions across their syntactic constraints—a factor that was developed in the instructional materials of this research. Cognitive linguistics (CL) and sociocultural theory (SCT, as developed by Gal’perin, 1969, 1992c) from his mentor, Vygotsky (1978, 1986), are two areas of research which apply full linguistic expression of word sense to their applications in ESL pedagogy. The combined principles of these two compatible theories were applied to the teaching and learning of three targeted prepositions, in, on, and of, in an experimental ESL advanced grammar class. Results were compared to the results of an additional ESL advanced grammar class, a control in the quasi-experimental study. This study is distinguished by its application of recent cognitive linguistic insights (Jang & Kim, 2010) in regard to the preposition of to ESL pedagogy and the inclusion of this highly frequent preposition in the targeted learning items. Statistical significance was found in the gains achieved in the accurate use of the targeted prepositions for both classes, the with-in subject factor; yet, while the experimental class clearly outperformed the control class during the short duration of the instruction (75 minutes), the study failed to find statistical significance for the curriculum, the between subject factor. The study is one of a very few which have attempted to apply CL and SCT insights to ESL teaching and learning of English prepositions, has pioneered classroom research with the preposition of—one of the three most frequent English words, and suggests the need for additional ESL classroom research with longer time frames and a more robust application of these encouraging results for longitudinal validation.