Phrase-Approach To Vocabulary Learning

This dissertation focuses on the function of phrases and aims to introduce and explain phrase-approach-learning vocabulary through phrases. It is author's belief that learning vocabulary through phrases is very effective and practicable than in isolation.It is because of the significance of phrases that the author raises the notion of phrase-approach. Its theoretical bases are semantic field and neurolinguistics. Semantic field interprets the interrelationship and interplay of words. Neurolinguistics shows how human brain creates the multidimensional semantic schema which indicates a phrase as a schema owns better stability than a word does.In order to testify the feasibility of phrase-approach, a comparative experiment between phrase-approach and point-approach was conducted among 50 tertiary students. The aim of experiment is to confirm in which way students can better comprehend the exact meanings: the isolated words or phrases containing the words. As a result, phrase-approach is more effective than point-approach. This means that phrase-approach is practicable and its application is meaningful.But its application seems not so successful as expected. In order to seek the reasonout, an investigation on the attitudes to phrase-approach was conducted among a class of 25 English majors. It is found that Chinese learners of English tend to adopt point-approach even though most of them realize the importance of phrases in any language because they thought that the shorter language unit is easier to learn. Therefore, some suggestions are offered so as to advance the application of this effective approach in vocabulary learning.At last, it is the author's hope that such an approach can help language learners to make greater progress in vocabulary learning.