A Study On How To Teach Phrasal Verbs Based On Prototype And Category Theory

Under usual circumstances,teachers teach phrasal verbs through simple analysis;example sentence explanation;repetition;review;and workbook exercises.In order to save time,they directly tell students the meanings of phrases.This method emphasizes the diligent accumulation of students,which is time-consuming and labor-intensive.They memorize several phrasal verbs with high-frequency in exams by rote.The notebooks are full of Chinese explanations for the phrases.To boost the quality of teaching phrasal verbs in secondary schools,make teaching more systematic,logical and scientific,and improve our teaching under the guidance of theory,cognitive linguistics was referred to.The prototype and category theory is fundamental to this research.This thesis is aimed to explore how to teach phrasal verbs more efficiently.The author consulted much available literature to understand the development of phrasal verb research in related fields and topics and the application of the given theory.If we regard phrasal verbs as a category of finite elements,then we need to look for the prototypical meaning and marginal meaning of this category by way of similarity attributes,and grasp the meanings at the basic level which are most commonly used.The developmental relationship between different meanings can be analyzed through the ideal cognitive model.In order to improve the operability,the author starts from a small point in the teaching process,the phrasal verbs of the verb "take".Experiments were used to prove the help of the selected theory in the target teaching field and to test its effect.The experimental objects were 115 students in the first grade of senior high school.There are 60 students in the experimental group,and the teaching design is based on the prototype and categorization theory.Students in the experimental group learn a simple version of the theories,look for the prototypical meanings of the phrases,develop the semantic network,and make a relationship diagram according to categorization principles like family resemblance and adjacent relationship.The 55 students in the control group,the teaching courseware is Chinese and English translations,sentences and pictures,and the teacher will lead the students to stop and review from time to time.After the experiment,interviews were used to understand the students’ views on the experiment,as well as their opinions on the prototype and categorization and the way of thinking in the cognitive model.The research found that: The advantage of teaching phrasal verb according to prototype and categorization theory is that the originally relatively irregular phrasal verbs are memorized more logically;meanings are regarded as a category,and the elements within the category are structured and processed.Secondly,about phrasal verbs,the thinking process of teachers and students is prolonged.When learning occurs in the process of active thinking,the knowledge points are deeply processed,and thus the memory effect is better.Compared with the usual method,by teaching phrasal verbs in this way,the students’ memory effect has been enhanced efficiently.In contrast to the control group,the experimental group has significantly increased their scores before and after the treatment(t=2.694,p=0.008<0.05).In the interviews,the students also agreed with this method.