A Study Of Category Theories And Their Applications In EFL Vocabulary Teaching And Learning

Linguistic categorization remains a major and core topic in cognitive linguistics, in which the theories of prototype and basic-level category deserve more attention in recent years. This thesis makes attempts to apply the theories in English vocabulary teaching and learning, in order to obtain valuable implications from it.The thesis consists of six parts. The first chapter discusses the importance of vocabulary in English learning and points out some misconceptions and problems in Chinese college students'vocabulary learning. Based on the category theories the author puts forward the purpose and significance of the current study. Chapter Two is an overview of the development of category theories, and gives a detailed account of the prototype and basic-level category theories. The literature review provides profound theoretical basis for the present study.Chapter Three combines the prototype theory and basic-level category theory with language study, especially vocabulary teaching and learning. One topic focuses on the explanation of polysemous words by prototype theory: prototypical meaning of a polysemous word is considered as the most representative meaning of the semantic category and obtained by a linguistic symbol at the earliest time, and usually learned by people at the very beginning. The other topic focuses on the basic-level terms denoted by basic-level category theory from linguistic perspective, that is to say, the basic-level words should be given sufficient attention in vocabulary teaching. It is intended to point out that active borrowing of category theories will give rise to unexpected fruits in the vocabulary teaching and learning.Two empirical studies are carried out in Chapter Four to test the feasibility and effectiveness of the prototype and basic-level category theories in vocabulary teaching and learning. The first experiment examines the vocabulary distribution in English majors'compositions, in order to highlight the importance of basic-level vocabularies. Thirty writing samples by English majors in Qiqihar University are collected and analyzed. The results show that vocabularies at the first level are used more frequently by the subjects in their compositions. It indicates that the subjects'L2 written productions mainly rely on basic-level vocabulary. That is to say, basic-level vocabulary plays fundamental role in vocabulary teaching and learning. The second experiment is the application of the prototypical knowledge in English words retention. Subjects in the experimental group recalled the target words with prototypical knowledge; while subjects in the control group remember the same words in random ways. The results of independent-samples t test show that subjects in the experimental group perform much better than those in the control group, which implies the absolute advantage of prototype model compared with the traditional random ways in vocabulary learning.In the light of the author's research, potential implications for EFL vocabulary teaching and learning are highlighted, and some strategies for vocabulary learning are put out in Chapter Five, such as core vocabulary strategy and category tree strategy. Chapter Six gives a summary of what has been discussed in this paper, also points out the limitations of the present study and the directions for the further research in this field.