This section consists of three parts. Section 3.3.1 presents a pilot study and its provisional results, and Section 3.3.2 concerns the procedures of the formal study. Section 3.3.3 reports scoring and statistical analysis of the findings in the present study.
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3.3.1 Pilot Study
The pilot study investigated Chinese EFL learners’ acquisition of English prepositions in terms of geometric types of prepositions (i.e., point, line, surface, and volume) with respect to the prototypical spatial information (i.e., contact, non-contact) in literal and metaphorical contexts. The subjects were twelve non-English majoring freshmen at National Taiwan Normal University, and they were grouped into low-level, low-intermediate-level, high-intermediate-level, and high-level. Three students were recruited for each level.
A comprehension task and a production task were conducted. The subjects were asked to choose the correct prepositions in multiple choice formats in the comprehension task and write down the correct prepositions in blank-filling formats in the production task. Each task consists of two parts, the first part contained 20 questions with guided pictures in literal context and the second part had 20 questions with conversations between two speakers in metaphorical contexts. Each correct answer to the question was given one point while a wrong one received zero.
The major findings of the study are as follows. First, the subjects’ overall performances on the two tasks corresponded to their English proficiency levels, that is, the overall score for the students at the higher level of English were better than those for the students at the lower level. Second, in comparing the subjects’ performances between the comprehension task and the production task, it was found that there were slight differences among the four English proficiency levels. For the students at the low level, they performed better on the production task than on the comprehension task with a small discrepancy. However, the results of the other three proficiency groups (i.e., low-intermediate-level, high-intermediate-level, and high-level) showed that they performed better on the comprehension task than on the production task. In the comprehension task, questions in literal context were easier to comprehend than questions in metaphorical context for the low-level students, the
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low-intermediate-level students, and the high-intermediate-level students while such result was reversed for the high-level students. In the production task, questions in metaphorical context tended to be easier for the beginning-level students to produce than questions in literal context. Third, with regard to the learning difficulty of different geometric types of English prepositions, both the comprehension and production tasks revealed that prepositions of the volume type was the easiest to acquire while prepositions of the line type was the most difficult. In addition, prepositions of the point, line, and surface types in metaphorical context in both tasks received higher scores than those in literal context in both tasks, while prepositions of volume type in literal context received higher scores than those in metaphorical context in both tasks. It was found that the contextual cues contributed more to the metaphorical usage of English prepositions. Furthermore, each geometric type with spatial information of contact received higher scores than those with spatial information of non-contact in literal and metaphorical contexts, except those of the line and surface types in metaphorical context. Hence, the spatial information of contact was considered contributive to acquiring the four geometric types of English prepositions in both literal and metaphorical contexts.
There were some limitations of the pilot study. First, the guided pictures provided in literal context were black-and-white which might not be clear enough for the subjects.
Second, in the comprehension task, some of the items in multiple choice formats might be ambiguous. Moreover, the pool of subjects was rather small; thus the results may not lead to a generalization of the examination.
3.3.2 Formal Study
Given the inadequacies of the pilot study, the formal study aimed to conduct a comprehension and a production task to investigate L2 acquisition of English prepositions based on four geometric types with spatial information in literal and metaphorical contexts.
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Two-person conversations were employed with test questions in literal and metaphorical contexts in both tasks. The subjects recruited from four classes of non-English majoring freshmen with different English proficiency at National Taiwan Normal University were asked to participate in the formal study. They were informed that the tasks would be used only for academic research and that information gathered during the study would be kept confidential. Before the tasks, each subject was given a consent form to sign. Moreover, clear instructions and examples of each task were provided to ensure their understanding of the formats of the tasks. The subjects were asked to take the production task before the comprehension task to circumvent the potential practice effects. It took one subject approximately 25 minutes to complete the two tasks.
3.3.3 Scoring and Statistical Analysis
The two tasks employed in the study contain trial sentences and fillers, only the responses to the trial sentences were analyzed. In the comprehension task, each correct response to the trial sentence was given one point, whereas a wrong answer received zero. In the production task, each correct response also received one point and wrong answers received zero.
The scoring was processed by the SPSS software for statistic analysis. The descriptive statistic revealed the overall mean scores and standard deviation of the data. One-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) and the post hoc Scheffe were executed to examine the extent of differences among the subject groups and the differences in the acquisition sequence of the geometric types. The present study was conducted as the flowchart shows below.
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Figure 3-1 Flow Chart of the Present Study