A Prototype Theory-Based Vocabulary Instruction For English Majors

Vocabulary, as one of the three essential elements in language, undertakes the role of conveying feelings or ideas as well as the foundation of language learning. And vocabulary has more been an obstacle for the majority of language learners than the other elements. Insufficient vocabulary will hinder learning language effectively and restrict the development of language skills, namely, listening, speaking, reading, writing and so on and so forth. Moreover, insufficient vocabulary even has an impact on their foreign language communicative competence. Therefore, vocabulary teaching plays a significant role in language learning. Most English majors in normal university will become teachers after graduation or interpreters or something closely connected with their major. Thus English teachers have the responsibility to find a more effective way to enhance the students’ vocabulary quantity, to guide the students have a comprehensive understanding of the English vocabulary.With the foundation of cognitive linguistics, categorization and prototype theory have been attracting great attention by the researchers abroad and home. The prototype theory, regarded as a revolution to Aristotle’s classical categorization, analyzes the internal connections of language from the cognitive prospective. It believes that students should be guided to lay emphasis on learning basic level words. They should be trained to be aware of the semantic relations of a polysemy’s different meanings. As a result, it advocates a foundation of semantic network with the purpose of stabilize vocabulary knowledge which shed some light on vocabulary teaching.The thesis first investigates the current situation of vocabulary learning and teaching in Changchun Normal University. It indicates that most of the English majors realize the importance of vocabulary. But they show little interest in it due to the present teaching method and learning methods. Thus an empirical study is carried out to testify the effectiveness of the integration of the prototype theory into vocabulary teaching. The research questions are:1) What is the current vocabulary learning situation of the Chinese English majors?2) Which is more effective in words learning for English majors, the traditional vocabulary teaching method or the teaching approach based on the prototype theory ?Primarily, the thesis conducts the questionnaire with ten questions to gain a better understanding of what learning strategies are employed by the students in vocabulary learning. Afterwards an empirical study of 18 weeks with two parallel English classes as the testees was conducted. The pre-test and posttest results are analyzed through students’ t-test. The result indicates after a semester of study, both the EC and CC have some achievements, but the EC represented a more obvious improvement. Thus this study shows a firm confirmation of the positive effect of a prototype- categorization based vocabulary teaching.The remainder of the thesis discusses further suggestions and limitation of the theory in vocabulary teaching. But all in all, this approach of teaching vocabulary from cognitive perspective will provide a new train of thought for English vocabulary teaching and has already appealed for an increase in linguistics study.