The Implications Of Cognitive Linguistics In Vocabulary Teaching

Nowadays, acquisition of vocabulary has begun to draw more and more attention and to assume a more important role, and as some would argue, the central role in learning a second language (Lewis, 1993). With this shift in emphasis, the classroom teacher is faced with the challenge of how best to help students store and retrieve words in the target language. It is undeniable that traditional vocabulary teaching has been playing a very important role in the process of vocabulary teaching in ESL classes. In order to perfect our "technique" to teach vocabulary, we cannot turn a blind eye to other "newborn" linguistic theories that will help our vocabulary teaching. This thesis will discuss the implications of the present development of cognitive linguistics to vocabulary teaching in ESL classes.This thesis falls into four chapters besides introduction and conclusion. Chapter One gives a historical review of the development of cognitive linguistics first. It looks back to the rise and maturity of this new approach. Cognitive linguistics is a very new approach that just rises in international linguistic field in recent years. From the year 1989 when marks its maturity till now, cognitive linguistics has made great progress in the linguistic study field in a very short time and formed its own schools with excellent linguists. Cognitive linguistics is today represented by three main approaches: the experiential view, the prominence view and the attentional view of language. To begin with the experiential view, its main claim is that when people use language to describe the world, they will not only limit their descriptions to objectivity but will offer more abundant and natural descriptions, also including metaphors. For example, when people describe a small car, they will not only say it is like a box, has wheels, doors, steering wheel, brake and so on; but also they will mention it is comfortable to sit, it runs very fast and even some people will connect it with social status and traffic accident. Another aspect of linguistic utterances that goes beyond logical reasoning and objectivity concerns the selection and arrangement of the information that is expressed, which is called prominence view of linguistic structures. Prominence view argues that the selection and arrangement of the information are determined by the prominent degree of information. For example, if we want to describe a phenomenon about a traffic accident. The sentence " The car crashed into the tree" will be more natural than the sentence "The tree was hit by the car" because in the whole scene the moving car is the most interesting and prominent part. An alternative approach is based on the assumption that what we actually express reflects which parts of an event attract our attention, and it can therefore be called the attentional view. According to the above-mentioned sentence "The car crashed into the tree" It only describes the information that can arouse our attention but other parts such as that the car turned around suddenly, dashed out the road are not described although such things really happened before the traffic. These three approaches constitute the basic frame of cognitive linguistics.Chapter Two includes a historical review of the changes of attitudes towards vocabulary teaching, the reasons why vocabulary should be taught in ESL classes, principles and practice in vocabulary teaching. This chapter aims at introducing a general knowledge of vocabulary teaching. Two reasons could explain why vocabulary was neglected in teacher-preparation programs. The first reason was that before the period 1940-1970 people emphasized too much on vocabulary teaching, who only paid attention to the enlargement of their vocabulary amount and ignored the importance of the grammar knowledge for their language learning. Such wrong belief resulted in their failure in English learning. Therefore in the following years more attention was put to the learners' grammar knowledge. The second reason was that for a long time linguists could not...