A Study Of English Vocabulary Teaching For Non-English Majors Based On Prototype Category Theory

Vocabulary is an important part of foreign languages, playing a pivotal role in the process of language teaching and learning.With the continuous development of foreign language teaching and research over the years, some linguists devote themselves to the studies of applying linguistic theories to language teaching. Prototype category theory, one of the main theories in cognitive linguistic field, is one of the focuses of their attention and has been applied to English vocabulary teaching activities. However, apart from those researchers studying theoretical flaws and possibilities of application, most of them explained the relationships between different items of polysemous words based on prototype category theory although their method of teaching are different. There are mainly three purposes in this thesis. Firstly, apply this theory to foreign language vocabulary to find out whether this method is more effective for learning and memorizing words than traditional method. Secondly, try to cultivate students to develop their own effective strategies of learning and memorizing English vocabulary under the guidance of prototype category theory. Thirdly, apply this theory to foreign language vocabulary to testify if prototype category theory is helpful to arouse students’interest in learning English.This experiment period has covered 15 weeks and selects two parallel classes of non-English majors of Beijing University of Agriculture as the research subjects including 82 students. Controlled class employed traditional method and experimental class employed new method based on prototype category theory. The experiment employed SPSS 16.0 and Excel as the supportive instruments for data collection and result analyzing.Based on the experiment, three conclusions can be arrived as follows:Firstly, new method based on prototype category theory is more effective than the traditional teaching method. Secondly, the new method can arouse students’more interests. Thirdly, compared with traditional method, new teaching method is more effective for developing and changing students’ learning strategies. Fourthly, through the repetitive activities related the new method in class, the students are better at presentation and discussion which can foster a more lively atmosphere.In addition, considering that objective conditions do not permit, there are many defects in this study, for example, the period of experiment is not long, Theexperiment scale is small and sometimes we cannot control students’ state of learning and so on. Aimed at these problems, related suggestions are provided in this thesis.