Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 6; November 03

The VAK Side to Prepositions

by Anne Dwyer
(adwyerbcn@hotmail.com)

I love prepositions. They have character. They are deep not shallow, they have both a physical and a metaphysical side; they have a personality all of their own and each preposition is unique. Prepositions are about relationships and like any relationship prepositions can be a challenge. They can also be fun. You can visualise most prepositions, move some, but hear only a few. Each preposition has a role to play and each plays that role to the full. You can play around with them, make them work for you.

I started teaching English some twelve years later. My first experiences of teaching English took place in Germany. A couple of years later I moved to Barcelona. Here I discovered that students did not see prepositions as a challenge, but as a problem. They did not find them fascinating, eye-opening or worth exploring; to them they were a headache, a burden, a frustration. “No, not prepositions!” they would wail, “I hate phrasal verbs! Why can't we use the Latin forms?” Of course, at the time, the communicative approach was all the rage and we were teaching L1 speaker forms to be used in a communicative context with increasing competence. Hence, as L1 speakers say 'use up' rather than 'consume', then this is what we should be teaching. Students needed to learn how to cope with prepositions, prepositional phrases and phrasal verbs, I felt; they needed to start feeling comfortable about them; they needed to lose their fear of them. Somehow, something had to be done.

I knew there was no full-proof solution. With the exception of Esperanto, languages, like the people who speak them, are never 100% reliable. If native speaker children learning their own language were able to acquire prepositions , so could my students. How do L1 English-speaking children manage? What could I do to improve my students' communicative competence as far as prepositions were concerned? What were their real difficulties?

I knew, of course, that the idiomatic use of prepositions in phrasal verbs can send even native speakers running for the dictionary. And if some pop star has just 'coined' the term, then a dictionary is not going to help. I suspected, however, (we are talking about the early eighties, before corpus data started being accessible, at least to the 'commoner' like me) that like 'most' irregular forms in language, challenging phrasal verbs must be either very rare (eg weigh in with) or very common (eg look after)

• Why were students confusing 'in' with 'into'; 'in' with 'on', 'out' with 'away'?
• Could I produce some sort of guideline to help students guess when phrasal verbs were separable? (Thomson and Martinet was not much of a help)
• They had the Streamline Departure Unit 25 drawings, what else might help?

That was when I started encouraging my students to feel the essence of each preposition. Doing so was not going to solve the entire problem: after all, not all uses of prepositions can be 'felt', but it might help, I thought, … and it did. It all started in 1985, in some in-company classes with scientists, who were finding scientific reading a real challenge, because they felt unable to cope competently with prepositions. The method I developed then has not changed and for the last 18 years this is what I've been doing:

1. (Instructions to students) Prepositions describe relationships. There are three main types of preposition: moving, static and conceptual. Look at the drawing of the prepositions and with your neighbour please decide which one are moving and which are static. (depicted as moving: into, out of, up, down, along, across, round; depicted as fixed: on, under, in, inside, outside, between, in front of, behind)

2. What other prepositions can you think of? (elicit of, off, over, under as a moving preposition, at, about, with, to, from, for, opposite, next to etc) Can you draw them?

3. Now, I want you to watch my hands and decide which preposition I am illustrating. (use your two hands to illustrate prepositions; there is no 'magic way' discovering how to represent prepositions is essential if you want to understand their ethos. Encourage students to guess. * place your right fist ON you left hand – flat out-stretched-; place your right fist UNDER your left hand; place your right fist BELOW your left hand; move your right fist UNDER your left hand; place your right fist NEXT TO your left hand; cup your left hand and place your right fist IN the cupped hand; close the left thumb and index finger and move your five right fingers INTO the hole formed; repeat the movement for ON, repeat the movement for IN, repeat the movement for INTO etc )

4. Experiment on your own for a moment. (you may like to choose a small text, appropriate to or below the level of the students, and ask them to read the text moving their hands whenever they spot a preposition)

5. Now, in pairs, can you illustrate prepositions and guess your partner's preposition.

1. Total Physical Response activity. (Call out the prepositions: Students should be able to see one another – in this way they will be able to observe different versions of the same theme.)

2. Building Block activity 1. (S1 uses rods to build a structure and describes the structure to his/her partner who tries to reproduce it and vv)

3. Building Block activity 2 (Ss work in teams, T builds a structure made of Lego or rods and hide the structure behind a screen/in another room. Each team sends one member to look at the structure. This person then tells the team how to build the structure. Return visits can be made as often as the team desires, all members can go and look, but only one at a time. The first team to finish correctly wins)

4. Reading text – good subject areas: medicine, science, engineering, social studies. Ask Ss to read a text in silence and to explore the dimensions of the language with the help of their hands.

I have used this method to great effect with many professional people (doctors, architects, engineers, business people) and primary teachers who have attended training sessions with me have applied the idea in their own classes. It works because it removes stress from prepositions; it works because it uses VAK properties to aid acquisition; it works because prepositions DO have a personality all of their own!