The Application Of Lconicity To The Vocabulary Teaching Of Medical English

Iconicity, which has become a focus of the attention of present academic world, is an important issue in linguistics. It exists on all levels of language, and can have some positive influence on language teaching.As an important component of medical English, English medical terminology has always been very difficult for the students to learn. Although some studies have been done in this area, the situation hasn't been improved a lot.The Thesis aims to do a systematic and comprehensive study on the application of iconicity theory to the teaching of English medical terminology. Firstly, it offers a general frame of iconicity. It reviews the definition of iconicity, the classification of iconicity, the principles of iconicity, and the iconicity related to vocabulary. Secondly, it looks back the features of medical English, the present studies on medical vocabulary, and the teaching of medical vocabulary at present. Thirdly, a survey based on questionnaire is conducted to learn students'attitudes, problems and strategies of medical English vocabulary learning at present. Fourthly, an experimental research is carried out to testify if it is fruitful to apply the theory of iconicity to English medical terminology teaching, and it is facilitated by the instruments of pre-test, post-test, and interview. Finally, it analyses the results of the questionnaire, pre-test, post-test, and interview to get the following conclusions:a. Although the students have a positive attitude and correct understanding towards the learning of medical English vocabulary, they don't know how to learn it effectively, and their methods of learning it aren't really limited before the teaching experiment.b. After a whole term's training, the students taught with the application of iconicity theory get higher scores than the students taught with traditional methods, which indicates that teaching medical English vocabulary with the application of iconicity theory can improve students'learning effects.c. Teaching English medical terminology with the application of iconicity theory can not only teach students new medical vocabulary but also some effective strategies of learning them.