The Application Of Categorization And Decategorization Theory To College English Vocabulary Teaching

As vocabulary teaching always composes the most important part of Chinese college English teaching, the new curriculum requirement for college students makes some requirements especially about vocabulary size and vocabulary competence. However, the current situation of college English vocabulary teaching and learning is far from being satisfactory due to its low efficiency and time-consumption. So how to help students to store words quickly and use words efficiently is a top priority for college English teachers in college English teaching. In recent years, with the development of the cognitive science, category theory has become a hot issue to be discussed in many aspects. Among them, family resemblance, prototype theory and basic level category have been used to study the words meaning. According to the decategorization theory firstly proposed by Hopper and Thompson for explaining the dynamic category of lexicon, this thesis attempts to dynamically illustrate the applications of the categorization and decategorization theory to college vocabulary teaching and learning. And this attempt will give supplement to categorization theory and form a dynamic and complete guidance in English vocabulary teaching and learning.This thesis is divided into five parts. The first chapter introduces the importance of vocabulary and the overview of vocabulary research and study in college English teaching and learning. In the second chapter, the author mainly interprets the theoretical foundation—categorization and decategorization theory, and their implications for college vocabulary teaching are introduced in the third chapter. With a purpose to testify whether vocabulary teaching based on categorization and decategorization theory will enlarge students' vocabulary size, extend students' vocabulary retention and promote students' vocabulary productive competence, the author elaborates a teaching experiment in Henan University of Technology where 120 freshmen from two intact classes were involved. The experimental class employed vocabulary teaching based on the categorization and decategorization theory, while the control class continued to use the traditional methods. The experiment lasted 15 weeks. It is proved in the end that the experimental teaching, which puts categorization and decategorization theory into classroom lexical instruction, can produce satisfactory results by enhancing the students' lexical competence, enlarging the students' vocabulary size and contributing to a certain degree to providing solutions to some of the lexical problems of Chinese college students. Furthermore, learning strategies that arouse their interest make the classroom atmosphere much better and the students show more interest in English vocabulary learning. In the last chapter of this thesis, the author summarizes the views mentioned in the former parts and points out the limitations of the experimental study.