Figure/Ground Schemas: Applying Cognitive Linguistics to teaching English prepositions through Visual Aids

Abstract

It is well-known that the Figure/Ground schemas provide a ‘cognitive’ basis for a range of linguistic structures, most notably relations between entities designated in a sentence that are expressed by an English preposition. Cognitive Linguistics, a branch of linguistics that studies language and mind in a cognitive way, enables us to understand how our mind can categorize, contrast, and possess the meanings of a sentence in relation to an English preposition through perception, memory and attention. The Figure/Ground schemas provide a way of analyzing the language usage of an English preposition to be mapped onto the situation not only mentally in our mind, but also in real life. The aims of the research are, first, to explore the psychological perspective of language by considering the human perspective or viewpoint in meaning construction; second, to look into the cognitive aspect in teaching English prepositions: how can Figure/Ground schemas help language learners to conceptualize the experience to be communicated in the real world; and, third, to develop some language teaching visual aids to help learners to acquire a higher language capacity to conceptualize situations in relation to an English preposition better by means of the Figure/Ground schemas. With the aims of the research to be achieved, this research could provide a theoretical framework of developing language teaching visual aids using the Cognitive Linguistics approach to help teaching English prepositions to enhance pedagogy more effectively. It is predicted that with visual aids developed for teaching English prepositions, young learners of lower cognitive abilities will have improvements in conceptualizing situations with the Figure/Ground schemas. For adult learners with higher cognitive abilities, these visual language teaching aids could strengthen and consolidate conceptualizing the situations in the mind better so as to distinguish what are the possible and the impossible situations in meaning construction. To dig deep down into this theoretical research, psychologists could carry out further research empirically to test this hypothesis to confirm to what extent the theoretical framework could work for learners of different levels of cognitive ability.