This study is about the acquisition of English prepositions in, on, at of Korean EFL learners. Rosch (1973) suggested that the categorized concept expands from the prototypical meaning to the metaphorically expanded meaning, which is called prototype ...
This study is about the acquisition of English prepositions in, on, at of Korean EFL learners. Rosch (1973) suggested that the categorized concept expands from the prototypical meaning to the metaphorically expanded meaning, which is called prototype theory. This has been applied in the studies of English prepositions acquisition. Dirven (1993) said that the prototype of the prepositions in, on, at is spatial meaning, whereas the temporal meaning is considered expanded meaning. That is, the spatial meaning of prepositions is easier to learn than the temporal meaning of them. However, there is no general agreement of prototype effect in terms of EFL learners’ prepositions acquisition.
With preceding studies about prepositions acquisition in Korean EFL learners, pointing out the important factors in prepositions learning are explicit explanation and sufficient input, this study aims to find out whether prototype theory affects Korean EFL learners when learning prepositions with explicit explanation and sufficient input.
18 Korean middle school freshmen were divided into two groups. One is explicit learning group, and the other is implicit learning group. Explicit learning group was divided into two subgroups. First group named space-time(S-T) group studied prepositions in the order of spatial to temporal meaning, and the other group named time-space(T-S) group studied prepositions in the order of temporal to spatial meaning. Implicit learning group studied with 4 stories including prepositional phrases. To compare before and after the treatment, participants were asked to take pretest and posttest, which were composed of grammaticality judgment task (GJT) and speaking test, and the scores of both pretest and posttest were analyzed by SPSS 23.
As a result, explicit learning group performed better than implicit learning group, suggesting the important factor of Korean EFL learners is explicit explanation with example sentences when learning English prepositions. In addition, prototype of prepositions affected Korean EFL learners, showing S-T group performed GJT better than T-S group. Even though there were not many participants and only in, on, at were dealt with, this study has implications in the field of pedagogy and applied linguistics in terms that how Korean EFL learners should study English prepositions and further studies with other prepositions would be worth conducting.