| Vocabulary acquisition plays a vital part in students' English learning. However, it is not an easy task. Even though students have a good stock of vocabulary, they may not use them appropriately. Such being the case, teachers are facing with the challenge of how to help students store and retrieve English words. It is undeniable that traditional vocabulary teaching has been playing a very important role in the process of vocabulary teaching. But, actually, it still has some defects. In order to help students learn English words efficiently, a better vocabulary teaching method should be applied.This thesis aims at providing such a method from the perspective of word meaning, including its theoretical bases and its application through a case study. For students, it is extremely complicated to remember various meanings of words. While, sense relations will make it easier. This paper pays close attention to such relations as polysemy, hyponymy, synonymy and antonymy, all giving inspiration to memorizing meanings of words. Under these relations, it forms a semantic network among words. Still further, the action of connectionism, which has revolutionized psycholinguistics, makes the semantics network be spreading activated. Thus, vocabulary learning becomes fruitful and enjoyable. In addition, this thesis lays special emphasis on stylistic meaning of words and metaphorical polysemy.Based on the data obtained from the questionnaire and vocabulary test, SPSS 12.0 is employed to analyze the differences between the experimental class and the control class as to know whether spreading activation network is performed effectively. According to the results, students in the experimental class show a higher level of competence in English vocabulary.Therefore, teachers can help students set up a spreading activation network based on sense relations in their minds, which will achieve unexpected and remarkable progress in English vocabulary learning.
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