This quasi-experimental study investigated the effectiveness of two types of vocabulary instruction — image-schema-based instruction (ISBI) and translation-based instruction (TBI) — on the acquisition of second language (L2) polysemous words. Fifty-eight Japanese high school learners of English were divided into two treatment groups (ISBI and TBI) and a control group. The treatment groups were given 20 minutes of instruction on the target words, namely the verb break and the preposition over. In order to examine the effectiveness of instruction, an acceptability judgment test and a production test were administered prior to instruction (pre-test), two days after instruction (post-test 1) and two weeks after instruction (post-test 2). The results showed that ISBI tended to be as effective as TBI for both acceptability judgment test and production test scores, except in one case where ISBI was significantly more effective than TBI. This study suggests that image-schema from the field of cognitive semantics can serve as a pedagogical devise in teaching L2 polysemous words.
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