The Application Of Prototype Theory In The English Vocabulary Teaching At Vocational Colleges

As one of the three essential elements of language, vocabulary is the main undertaker ofconveying ideas or feelings as well as the foundation of any language learning. For the majorityof language learners, the most difficult obstacle is no more than the vocabulary. The deficiencyof vocabulary may severely restrict the development of language skills, such as listening,speaking, reading, writing, translating and so forth, and even exert an impact on theimprovement of their communicative competence with a foreign language. Therefore,vocabulary teaching plays an indispensable role in the language acquisition. However, the highervocational students generally have weak foundation for English, thus it becomes one of thechallenging difficulties for vocational colleges to enhance students’ vocabulary size and depth,and even develop their learning autonomy through finite period of instruction.In recent years, the prototype theory has drawn an extensive attention among theresearchers abroad and home as well as the frontline teachers of English vocabulary. As thefoundation of cognitive linguistics, the prototype theory analyzes the inner links of languagesfrom the cognitive perspective. It holds that during the language instruction, students should beled to lay emphasis on the learning of basic category vocabulary, and beware of the semanticrelationships among different meanings of a polysemous word. In addition, it advocates thefoundation of semantic network of vocabulary with the purpose of deepening vocabularyknowledge.In this paper, the author commences from the investigation of the present situation ofvocabulary teaching in higher vocational colleges as well as research status of the prototypecategory theory, aiming to testify the effectiveness of the application of the prototype theory tothe vocabulary teaching in high vocational colleges through empirical researches. Theresearching questions are listed as follows:(1) Can the application of prototype theory to English vocabulary teaching help studentsenlarge English vocabulary?(2) Can the application of prototype theory to English vocabulary teaching enhancestudents’ vocabulary mastery depth?(3) Can the application of prototype theory to English vocabulary teaching developstudents’ autonomy for English vocabulary learning?Primarily, the author took the form of questionnaire survey to investigate the currentlearning situation of English vocabulary in Shandong International Institute of Translation, and probed into the existing problems in the way of reflection and summary. Then, an experimentalresearch of16weeks was conducted with two parallel Spanish classes as its researching subjects,which were randomly divided into an experimental class and a controlled class. Before theexperiment, a pretest was conducted in the two classes, and with the aid of SPSS19.0, a resultwas drawn that there doesn’t exist any obvious difference between the two classes. Then thecontrolled class continued to be taught with traditional vocabulary teaching methods. As for theexperimental class, the prototype theory was integrated into its vocabulary teaching, whichattached great importance to the detailed elaboration of the basic-level vocabulary, theinterpretation of the polysemous words based on this theory, and even the guidance of students toestablish the semantic network accordingly. At the end of the experiment, students were requiredto take a post-test, and then the author employed SPSS19.0to analyze and compare the data ofboth pretest and post-test statistically. The results showed that after a semester of Englishvocabulary learning, both the vocabulary quantity and quality of the two classes had beenimproved, but the experimental class represented a more obvious raise, which showed that theefficient application of the prototype theory to vocabulary teaching can not only enlarge students’vocabulary but also enhance their vocabulary depth. In addition, after the experiment, the authorconducted a questionnaire survey targeted at the two classes with the aid of the autonomouslearning scale which was formulated for higher vocational college students. The resultsdemonstrated a remarkable fact that the students in the experimental class showed greaterautonomy than those in the controlled class, which indicated that the integration of prototypetheory into the vocabulary teaching can develop students’ autonomy for English vocabularylearning.This study is an attempt to integrate the prototype theory into the English vocabularyteaching in higher vocational colleges. This vocabulary teaching approach can help learnersacquire vocabulary effectively, thus stimulate the interests of students in vocabulary learning andeven develop their autonomous learning ability. This method of vocabulary explanation from thecognitive perspective will provide a new train of thought for the following English vocabularyteaching.