An Empirical Study On Polysemous Words Teaching Method Based On Pragmatic Enrichment

Polysemy is an essential feature of English vocabulary.In fact,most words in English are polysemous words while monosemous words are very rare.In addition,polysemous words themselves may cause semantic ambiguity or vagueness because of its multiple senses.In vocabulary teaching of college English,how English teacher guides students to master the multiple senses of polysemous words and select the proper sense to understand the pragmatic meaning of words is always the difficulty in English language teaching.Guided by pragmatic enrichment theory,this paper improved the teaching method of polysemous words from the instruction of multiple senses and class practice,and conducted a teaching experiment.The aim of teaching experiment is to examine whether polysemous words teaching method based on pragmatic enrichment can improve the retention of multiple senses and the ability to use polysemous words.A seven-week teaching experiment was conducted in normal English classes for 81 non-English majors of a college in Xi'an,who came from two natural classes with similar English proficiency.One of the classes received traditional polysemous words teaching method as the control group,and the other was treated with polysemous words teaching method based on pragmatic enrichment as the experimental group.After the teaching experiment,the two classes were asked to take the posttest.Their test achievements were analyzed by means of SPSS.It's concluded that the teaching method proposed in this research can improve the retention of multiple senses of polysemous words greatly but its effect on the improvement of ability to use polysemous words is not obvious.Based on the research results,the author discussed the reasons behind them and the limitations in this research,and put forward some suggestions for further study.The polysemous words teaching method put forward by this thesis could motivate students to deeply process the learned words,helping them construct semantic net system and improve memory efficiency.It can also guide students realize the effect of context on the understanding and selection of polysemous words,thus establishing proper language acquisition view.