An experimental comparison of cognitive versus traditional approaches to teaching the prepositions: in, on, at

Abstract

When learning a new language, prepositions are as commonly used as they are difficult to master. In the Spanish learning context, the first and most common prepositions to be taught in Secondary Education are the units in, on, at. However, the fact that the teaching of these prepositions comes at an early stage does not mean that they are easy to learn. In fact, teaching materials have typically assumed that prepositions are used in a non-systematic way, thus dealing with them from a collocational perspective. Against that position, research in the field of Cognitive Linguistics (henceforth CL) has demonstrated that only a small minority of prepositional uses are thoroughly idiomatic. According to this discipline, there exist two positions in relation to prepositional meaning, namely monosemy and polysemy. Following the latter perspective, Navarro i Ferrando (1998) has developed a theoretical model in which the meanings of the prepositions in, on and at can be described by radial networks containing spatial, force-dynamic and functional semantic elements. In the present study, the effectiveness of this model in teaching the prepositions in, on, at has been tested. For this purpose, an experiment has been designed in which two groups of 4th-year ESO are taught the target prepositions following two different approaches: CL-based and traditional, respectively. Thus, it is hypothesised that, after the study, the group following the CL approach will present a higher improvement in their command of the target prepositions than the group taught by means of a traditional approach. The overall results obtained in the experiment corroborate the hypothesis stated above, thus proving the advantages that a field such as CL can offer to the sphere of language teaching. However, the results also suggest the necessity of further research that helps to understand the extent to which factors such as motivation can influence the success of this approach.