An Empirical Study Of Applying Cognitive Psychology To English Vocabulary Teaching In Middle School

This thesis is an empirical study of applying cognitive psychology to vocabulary teaching in middle school. This study aims at applying the latest cognitive psychological theory to vocabulary teaching in order to improve the efficiency of vocabulary teaching in middle school.Cognitive psychology is a branch of psychology concerned with human mental processes. It studies how we think, learn, process, memorize, feel and behave, especially with respect to the internal events occurring between sensory stimulation and the overt expression of behavior. The acquisition of lexicon is now recognized as the central and fundamental role to the language acquisition. In the acquisition process, cognitive psychology influences individuals to a great extent. Understanding and controlling cognitive process may be one of the most essential skills.This study is on the basis of the information processing theory, which divides the processes of vocabulary acquisition into input, central processing, and output. The characteristics of the three stages have been discussed from cognitive psychological point of view, and relevant strategies have been proposed according to the characteristics. A teaching experiment has been carried out between experimental group and control group in order to testify the effectiveness of these strategies.On the basis of the experimental results, some vocabulary teaching strategies have been proposed, which can make some contribution to the teaching and learning of English vocabulary.