| English Vocabulary teaching is an important component of English language teaching. For the English learners, the number of vocabulary has a direct effect on the improvement about the listening, speaking, reading and writing at all levels. Language vocabulary is the ladder to the peak of language, providing framework of language skills. However, as a foreign language, English vocabulary is always regarded as"a lion in the way"or"a hot potato", especially to the Middle school students. On one hand, the students are always complaining that they can not use the learned vocabulary flexibly and vocabulary learning is rather dull and low efficiency. On the other hand, their teachers tend to think that the low efficiency of vocabulary learning is the students'negative learning attitudes. In light of the studies of cognitive disciplines, language learning is a process of cognition rather than simply piling up the lexical rules, and perhaps this can explain the fact that a great number of students are not capable of dynamic and flexible language employment in contexts. A word in practical applications does not exist in isolation and it has a distinct meaning in contexts. For decades, the studies on the attributes of vocabulary, vocabulary instruction, learning strategies, vocabulary acquisition and its connection with language skills are quite fruitful, However, in the current study, it seems that the process of vocabulary teaching is considered as a relatively independent area.The study is mainly based on the framework of metaphor, cognitive linguistics theories and conceptualization, the present study attempts to discover the motivation of language from a cognitive aspect, to connect vocabulary instruction with human cognition and the world of experience, to integrate vocabulary, syntax and discourse instruction organically and in order to explore an effective approach to vocabulary teaching, and to improve language proficiency of learners.To illustrate its effect and application in vocabulary instruction at different levels, we carry out an empirical study to get the data. The empirical study is conducted among 112 freshmen in two intact classes in No.1 High School Shouguang, Shandong Province, who are divided into control group and experimental group. In control group, we teach vocabulary in a traditional way and in experimental group from the cognitive theory. This empirical study mainly studies three questions: Will students be better motivated to be taught vocabulary from a cognitive perspective? Can this cognitive approach develop students'vocabulary breadth and depth? Can this cognitive approach improve students'language proficiency?Descriptive statistics analysis of SPSS is applied to analyze the relative data. After data collection and analysis, we have got these answers to each of the questions above: Judging by their performance in class and responses in the interview, the students in experimental group are far more strongly motivated in vocabulary learning than those in control group. According to the figures of the tests, vocabulary instruction from the cognitive theory can develop both the breadth and depth of vocabulary. In the test of sentence understanding and translation, the students in experimental group show the greater progress in their language proficiency.This empirical study illustrate that students in experimental group have performed much better compared with those in control group, which practically shows that cognitive perspective of vocabulary teaching method is obviously superior to the traditional vocabulary teaching methods.
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