An Empirical Study Of English Vocabulary Teaching At A Vocational College Based On Prototype Theory

Vocabulary acquisition is an important integral part of language acquisition.Traditional teaching techniques, however, are far from satisfactory with greatconcentration on the illustration of word pronunciation, formation, acceptations and thestrategies of memorization rather than the explanation of underlying relationship amongdifferent meanings of a word from the cognitive perspective. Prototype theory, one of thekey standpoints of cognitive linguistics, analyzes intrinsic relationships of language indetail from the cognitive perspective. The theory, thus, can help learners deeplycomprehend the cognitive process of language learning and its application. Meanwhile itprovides theoretical basis for the promotion of vocabulary breadth and depth.By means of an empirical study, this thesis is intended to testify the feasibility andeffectiveness of the introduction of prototype theory to vocabulary teaching at thevocational college. Three main questions are addressed as follows:1) Can the application of prototype theory to vocabulary teaching enlarge students'vocabulary size?2) Can the application of prototype theory to vocabulary teaching improve students'vocabulary depth?3) Can the application of prototype theory to vocabulary teaching facilitate students'immediate and delayed recall of lexical items?This project is basically a quasi-experimental research in which quantitative andqualitative analysis are combined. Two parallel classes of sophomores in Linyi UniversityYishui College are selected in this experiment with one as experimental group (EG) andthe other as the control group (CG). Two contrastive teaching approaches are adopted.Traditional teaching techniques are presented to the control group, while the other group isinstructed under the guidance of prototype theory. The experiment lasts twelve weeks. Thedata gathering instruments are composed of a questionnaire, a pre-test, an immediate recalltest, one week delay test as well as a post-test. The data collected from the questionnaire and tests are calculated and analyzed via EXCEL and SPSS16.0. Based on the analysis,some suggestions are offered concerning the pedagogical implications for vocabularyteaching practice. First, taking priority over basic level lexical terms can not only helpstudents lay a solid foundation for English acquisition, but also expand learners'vocabulary size. Second, explaining the polysemous words based on prototype theory canmake students have a deeper understanding of the underlying and intrinsic relationship ofword senses. Third, committing vocabulary to memory by semantic organization can helpstudents keep a short-term and long-term retention.The study testifies that incorporating prototype theory into vocabulary teaching at thevocational college can facilitate students' vocabulary learning, and will provide somereferences for future studies on vocabulary acquisition.