抄録
In recent years, several researchers have examined how second and foreign language learners can benefit from the insights of cognitive linguistics. There are, however, two fundamental issues: learnability and teachability. This paper investigates those two issues, learnability and teachability, as they relate to a cognitive linguistics approach to teaching the English prepositions in, on, and at to Japanese learners of English. The results of two studies are presented in this paper. The first study investigates whether Japanese learners of English can obtain positive gains through a cognitive linguistics approach, which uses a central image schema and a semantically motivated network. The results suggest that a cognitive linguistics approach is pedagogically more effective than the traditional approach to teaching English prepositions, in which instructors make no attempt to elucidate the motivated nature of polysemy. The second study reports the results of a qualitative analysis of the opinions of the teachers at junior high and senior high schools about the new approach. The teachers think that a cognitive linguistics approach has potential, although they also experience anxiety about using a new approach. Based on the results of the two studies, this paper discusses the necessity to develop worksheets and teaching manuals that the teachers can easily use without possessing linguistic knowledge.
