Lexcial Competence, Polysemy Instruction And Idiom Acquisition

As a universal phenonmenon in English vocabulary. polysemy refsemy refers to a word that has multiple meanings which are related somchow.Most teachers would interpret the current meaning or the one mostly related from the contextual angle while ignore the illustration of the word's origin.motivation and the relationship between different meanings.This kind of teaching method will bring students much more burden in studing and be of little benefit in improving students'language competencc.English idioms constitute another essential part—one essential part as polysemous words—in general vocabulary which involves those fixde expressions and phrases and short sentences that are inventde by long-term repeated use of language and naturally distillde into coneise forms that convey deep meanings and manifest rich cultural information of that language.This thesis. facilitated with cognitive linguistic theories like cateorization. prototype theory.image-schema and conccptual metaphor.intends to prove that the effect of polysemy instruction is related to and enhances idiom acquisition.The research questions are listde as follows:1.Does the polysemy teaching with cognitive theories benefit students'lexical competence and how does the retention perform in the long-period?2.Is there any correlation between polysemy instruction and idiom acquisition? And if it is the case. is there any significant progress in student's idiom acquisition after the instruction on polysemy learning by cognitive methods?3.Is there any different teaching effect in students' performance by different cognitive methods applide in instruction?The experiment selectde 90 non-English major frshnmen from Anhui Medical University as the subjects. and divided them into 3 groups as---CG(control group. traditional teaching mehtod as explanaion and sentence exanples).EG1 (experimental group 1. prototype theory and image-schema applide in polysemy instruction). EG2 (experimental group 2. EG1+conceptual metaphor applide in polysemy instruction). There are totally 3 tests (1 pretest.2 post-tests) during the process and SPSS 17.0 is employed to conduct the data analysis over subjects' scoresThe result positively proved the first two research questions with statistical data and tables as:1. cognitive theories' positive effect on students' lexical competence. especially polysemes acquisition; and2. instruction on polysemy affects positively on idiom acquisition.However, this experiment failed to confirm that significant difference would occur between the two experimental groups after the instruction including different cognitive theories from a statistical angle. The experiment, as a whole, verified the writer's argument that the polysemy instruction guided by some cognitive theories would promote students' idiom acquisition. Lastly, the writer proposes that teachers should voluntarily adopt cognitive theories into common teaching practice:and teachers themselves should reinforce the language proficiency and enrich their knowledge:students should be encouraged to cultivate their cognitive thinking strategy and enhance their cognitive competence gradually.