A Study On The Effect Of Prototype Category Theory On English Polysemy Acquisition Of College Students

Vocabulary has always been the learning focus for EFL learners.In English learning,polysemous words often cause much trouble for EFL learners,thus numerous researches have been done by teachers and scholars with a view to solve the problems.Following with the rise of the cognitive linguistics(CL)in the 1970 s,linguists at home and abroad began to work on this new academic field.They tried to interpret the mechanism of polysemy by cognitive linguistic,so as to improve polysemy learning efficiency.As one of the basic theories in CL,the prototype category theory has drawn much attention from teachers and researchers.However,despite the fact that abundant studies were conducted in the past decades,most of them focused on theoretical introduction and commentary review(Wang Yin,2007;Yang Lijuan2003).Besides,limited empirical studies are centered on high school students(Cai Jingzhen,2018;She Shini,2017).As a result,focusing on the college students,the present research was designed to explore whether the prototype-based method in polysemy teaching can contribute to the acquisition of polysemous words for college students.Specifically,the following questions will be investigated:1.Can prototype-based method in vocabulary teaching improve the efficiency of students' English polysemy acquisition ?2.Can prototype-based method in vocabulary teaching improve students' interest in learning English polysemy and change their attitude towards learning English polysemy?3.Can prototype-based method in vocabulary teaching change students' polysemy learning strategies?Both quantitative and qualitative research methods were employed in this study,including questionnaire,test and interview methods.The subjects were freshmen of non-English majors in a university of Shanxi province.After a 16-week experiment procedure,the data were collected and analyzed.The statistical software Excel and SPSS were employed in data processing.The results revealed that the prototype-based method used in polysemy teaching has a positive effect on polysemy learning as a whole.It can improve students' interest in learning English polysemy,change both their attitude towards polysemy and their learning strategies.These findings carry some pedagogical significance to polysemy teaching practice.Foreign language teachers are advised to attach special emphasis to the semantic extension mechanisms of polysemous words and pay enough attention to the core meaning of polysemy.However,there still exist some shortcomings in this thesis.For instance,effective factors like gender and age of the subjects were not taken into account,which could affect the experiment results.Future researchers are expected to do better in this respect.