Effectiveness of a CL-informed approach to English preposition acquisition by young Chinese learners

While increasing efforts have been made to teach English prepositions to EFL learners from a Cognitive Linguistics (CL) perspective, the bulk of the extant research has focused on adult learners at the advanced English proficiency level and reported only quantitative results. Limited attention has been paid to elementary learners, and there has been little qualitative evidence of the pedagogical effectiveness of CL-informed approaches. This study aims to address these issues with a quasi-experiment embedded in an explanatory sequential mixed-methods design. Twenty-two young Chinese learners received two types of instruction, respectively, to learn locative prepositions in, on, and at. A conceptual metaphor time as space that originates in CL was exploited as the intervention for the experimental group, whereas a data-driven approach was adopted for the control group. Quantitative data collected from the participants through a set of tests and qualitative data collected from the instructor with a semi-structured interview generally supported the effectiveness and, to a lesser extent, the efficiency of the CL-informed approach. The paper concludes with a discussion of the pedagogical implications derived from the empirical results.