The Theory Of Iconicity And Its Application To Foreign Language Teaching

Iconicity, as a focus of the attention of present academic world, is an important issue in linguistics. It works on all levels of language. Iconicity also plays a major role in language teaching, and has positive influence on teaching.This paper aims to do a systematic and comprehensive study on the issue of iconicity, and applies this theory to foreign language teaching. For this purpose, this thesis studies iconicity with inductive method and exemplification. Firstly, the paper offers a general frame of iconicity. It reviews the history of the theory of iconicity, discusses the definition and classification of iconicity, focuses on lexical iconicity, syntactic iconicity and textual iconicity, and discusses the manifestation of iconicity from different aspects. Secondly, it applies the theory of iconicity to language knowledge teaching from the phonetic, lexical and grammatical perspectives, to language skills teaching from the listening, speaking, reading and writing aspects. It is believed that, the theory of iconicity can help teachers get an ideal teaching result. The research on iconicity has both theoretical and practical values.