Teaching The Persian Preposition “Be” to Non-Persian Speakers Based on Cognitive Approach

Since learning of prepositions is considered one of the challenging areas of language teaching and learning and some researchers believe that these meanings are created randomly and the only way to learn them is to memorize these meanings, the present study tries to use the Cognitive lexical semantics approach to obtain the semantic network of the preposition "be" and then provides a coherent content to teach the multiple senses of this preposition in various structures and contexts. Also, in this research, the features of the curriculum of teaching prepositions with a cognitive approach are presented and a textbook focusing on prepositions is proposed. The educational content compiled for this preposition was taught to two classes of 15 female intermediate Farsi learners, in such a way that for the experimental group, a lesson was prepared with a cognitive approach, but in the control group, the lesson was taught in a traditional way. Then, in a test, the understanding and application of various concepts of the preposition "be" were measured. The obtained results show that the experimental group performed better than the control group. These results show that such content and lesson plan, which is based on the visual schema of prepositions, helps a lot to understand and learn the multiple senses of prepositions in the form of a radial category.

Prepositions play a significant role in language as they join words and phrases in a sentence. prepositions have traditionally been seen as unpredictable, implying that the best way to learn them would be through rote learning. Cognitive approach in the other hand, argues that the distinct meanings associated with a particular preposition are systematically related in principled ways, which may have important ramifications for second language instruction.
One of the challenges facing cognitive semanticists is to explain how polysemy is formed, because in this view, it is assumed that linguistic categories are basically no different from other types of categories and are organized by the same general cognitive mechanisms. Based on this approach, sub-concepts branch off from the meaning of the prototype. The semantic network for a lexical element can include several different meanings that are related to each other and each of them may have different meanings. Also, the semantic network predicts the emergence of concepts that are part of the main or secondary meanings. The process that connects these primary and secondary meanings is called chaining (Evans and Green, 2005: 332-333).
Language teachers and researchers (e.g. Selce-Murcia & Larsen-Freeman, 1999) have found that learning prepositions poses major challenges for language learners. One of the reasons for this is that it is difficult to describe the meaning of prepositions. In addition, prepositions have wide and complex meanings (Tyler, Muller, & Hu, 2011); Even the best dictionaries and grammars offer multiple meanings of prepositions, mostly arbitrarily. Traditional grammars have shown the meaning of prepositions are unrelated to each other (Bloomfield, 1933; Frank, 1972; Chomsky, 1995); As a result, memorization is often suggested as the best way to learn the different meanings of prepositions.
Tyler and Evans (2003: 45-47) propose criteria for determining the prototypical meaning of prepositions, which in their research are considered as criteria for determining the primary meaning within the semantic network:A: Earliest attested meaning
B: Predominance in the semantic network
C: Use in composite forms
D: Relation to other prepositions
E: Grammatical prediction

The research was conducted in four stages. At first, we extracted the meanings of the preposition "be" and investigated them. In the second step, we found the prototype meaning of the preposition by the criteria of Tyler and Evans (2003), and drew its semantic network. In the third stage, we developed a material for teaching this preposition. In the fourth stage, in order to evaluate the effectiveness of the cognitive approach in teaching the Persian prepositions, we selected 30 virtual intermediate level Persian learners of Qom State University, 15 of whom were selected as the experimental group and were taught cognitive educational content, and the other 15 were selected as the control group and were taught prepositions in the traditional way. At first, the students completed a questionnaire related to the level of familiarity with the Persian language, in order to eliminate heterogeneous samples from the experimental and control groups. Next, both groups participated in a pre-test to ensure that their language level was not above or below the intermediate level. Then, the control group was taught the preposition "be" in the traditional way, while the teaching of these prefixes was done to the experimental group in a cognitive way. Then, all Farsi learners participating in the research took part in the post-test and the obtained data were analyzed. The independent variable in this research is teaching Persian prepositions based on the cognitive linguistics approach and the traditional approach, and the dependent variable is learning the concepts of preposition "be".

In order to investigate the effect of using the cognitive approach in teaching the preposition "be", in the learning process of Persian students, a sample lesson designed to teach the various concepts of this preposition was used in Qom State University. In the pre-test, the experimental group had an average score of 17 and the control group had obtained an average score of 17.13. The experimental and control groups obtained almost similar results in the pre-test. After teaching the various meanings of the preposition "be", a post-test was conducted to measure the understanding and application of the various concepts of this preposition, by Persian students of two groups, and the resulting data were analyzed. In this test, the highest score of the experimental group was 20 with a frequency of 6, and in the control group, the highest score was 19 with a frequency of 1. The lowest score in the experimental group is 18 with a frequency of 4 and the lowest score in the control group is 16 with a frequency of 3. According to the calculations, the average scores in the experimental group was 19.13 and in the control group was 17.20 and the standard deviation in the experimental group was 0.83 and in the control group was 0.94. According to the obtained results, it seems that the experimental group performed better than the control group, and the performance of the subjects in this group was somewhat more homogeneous. To compare the average score of the test, the two experimental and control groups, from the t-test It was used independently. The use of this test requires checking the normality of the distribution of test scores in two groups. Due to the non-significance of the Kolmogorov Smirnov test (0.77) and the result of the Kolmogorov Smirnov test (0.151), it was determined that the data of the test has a normal distribution and the use of independent t-test is allowed. In the t-test (P=0.05), a significance level of less than 0.05 was obtained, which indicates the significance of the difference between the performance of the two experimental and control groups. Because the higher the value of t, it indicates the non-randomness of the obtained findings. The t value of 6.24 with a degree of freedom of 28 indicates that the difference between the scores obtained in the control and experimental groups was significant and the hypothesis of the effectiveness of the cognitive teaching method of the preposition "be" was confirmed.
In this research, in order to check the validity of the form and content of the test, 5 experts in the field of teaching Persian language to non-Persian speakers were consulted and they evaluated the test as suitable in terms of appearance and content. Reliability was obtained from the method of dividing the test into two halves to measure the reliability of the test, and then the results of the two tests were compared with each other and the correlation coefficient of the two was determined through the Pearson method. Considering the correlation coefficient of "0.838" and the P value of "0", it can be concluded that the test has an acceptable correlation. In the next step, with the help of the Spearman-Brown formula, the reliability coefficient of the whole test was obtained, which was equal to "0.91", which indicates the appropriate reliability of the test.

The first goal of this theoretical research was to examine the suffix "be" based on the approach of cognitive semantics and determining the meaning of that using the criteria suggested by Tyler and Evans (2003), finding the various meanings of this preposition, specifying the prototype meaning and drawing its semantic network. The second goal of this research was to develop a cognitive material to teach the concepts of this preposition "be".
Based on the test results, using cognitive approach to teach the concepts of prepositions can be effective and has a significant impact on the process of learning the different concepts of the prepositions in the learners` mind.
Accordingly, It seems that a cognitive educational material for teaching the various concepts of prepositions should have the following features:
To cover the concepts in the semantic network as much as possible in different textures.
To emphasize on the primary spatial meaning of the prepositions.
to start teaching of preposition grammar by presenting the various concepts in the semantic network in a meaningful process with a particular order of teaching more physical concepts first and objective concepts next.
Content arrangement should be in such a way that the learner can understand the potential reason of formation of more abstract applications and can relate abstract concepts to their daily experiences, understand the various content in a unified way, understand the various contents in a unified way, and not to be obliged to memorize all the meanings of the prepositions to use them in different contexts.