An Exploration For The Vocabulary Teaching Of College English From Perspective Of Cognitive Theories

Vocabulary is the basic form and unit of human language, which is the basis for man to communicate with each other. Therefore, it occupies the very important status in human language. As for the second language learners, the improvement of the language competence and the development of the communicating ability are all closely related with vocabularies. To some extent, whether the learners could overcome the barrier of vocabulary will directly decide the learning effect. However, the importance of the vocabulary teaching in language teaching does not receive the efficient attention, because there are no systematic vocabulary teaching theory and the efficient teaching strategies. The loose basis of vocabulary can not help learners improve their language competence and achieve the expected learning effect, which result in "wasting time, achieving no effect". Therefore, the study on vocabulary teaching has the very important theoretical and realistic significance.According to cognitive linguistics, the world is composed of various objects. People classify and locate the objects through the ways of analysis, judgment and classification, etc. the mental process of classifying the objects is called categorization, which is a way to recognize the world. The levels of categorization and the prototype is the concrete representation to recognize the world. Therefore, the characteristics of the cognition will be inevitably seen in the process of English vocabulary teaching and learning.This paper makes the explorations on the aspects of English vocabulary teaching basing on the theory of cognitive linguistics, such as phonetic teaching, English word formation teaching and the English semantic teaching, including the recognition and understanding of speech sounds, the cognitive explanation to English word formation, the semantic change and the analysis of the polysemy. This paper also put forward the active suggestions and solutions to how to improve the lexical competence of learners, such as the width, depth and the communicating competence of the vocabularies.