Nominal Vocabulary Teaching Strategies In Grade 11 English Class In Term Of Category Theory

Vocabulary plays a crucial role in the process of language learning and communication. And the mastery of nominal vocabulary accounts for a significant proportion in English vocabulary acquisition. Therefore, it is important for us to discuss what effective teaching strategies we should use to help the students master sufficient nominal vocabulary, to lengthen their memories and to improve their listening, speaking, reading and writing skills. High school sophomore year is a critical period of learning English and accumulating; vocabulary. In this period, the students'cognitive development tends to be mature, their ability of memorizing reaches the optima and the stability of their attention is close to adult level. Therefore, they can dominate their memory according to their own learning objectives. Enlightened by this fact, the author applies the category theory of cognitive linguistics to the nominal vocabulary teaching of the high school sophomore students, making a systematic research and exploring a series of feasible nominal vocabulary teaching strategies.To study the method of vocabulary teaching from the cognitive perspective is quite different from the traditional way, which enjoys the advantages of being theoretical, systematic and timely. Therefore, the author applies cognitive theory to the nominal vocabulary teaching practices. In order to testify the systematicness, controllability and effectiveness of the strategies drawn from practice, the author has conducted an experiment and made a full analysis of the experimental data. The experiment is carried out between two equivalent classes in Hai Cheng Senior High School where the author works, and it lasts four months from Mar. to July in 2010. The author chooses one class as the experiment control class and the other as the experiment contrast class, applying nominal vocabulary teaching strategy guided by the category theory to the experimental class, and the traditional vocabulary teaching strategy to the contrast class. Before the experiment, the author has made a survey on the students of the two classes respectively through questionnaires. After four months of contrast teaching, the author has conducted the after-test and interviews to both the experiment class and contrast class, and analyzes the data and information gained from the after-test and interviews. The results show us that there are obvious distinctions between the two classes in the nominal vocabulary learning, and reveal that this set of teaching strategies can improve students'ability to memorize nominal vocabulary, which are good for breaking the bottleneck of traditional vocabulary teaching method, and therefore, the students'ability to understand and memorize nominal vocabulary can be improved.The thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one covers the significance of the topic and the structure of the thesis. Chapter two is the literature review, which introduces the research backgrounds, theories of prototype category and basic category both at home and abroad, and then briefly reviews the domestic studies on the vocabulary teaching. Chapter three concentrates on the experiment, which mainly covers the hypothesis, experiment aim, experiment subject, experiment design and procedures etc. Chapter four analyzes the experiment data and makes a summary. Chapter five is the conclusion. The author briefly summarizes the whole thesis. The experiment shows that the nominal vocabulary teaching strategies guided by category theory can help the high school sophomore students to master nouns effectively. At the end of the thesis, the author points out the shortcomings of the experiment in order to offer some insights to the future study of the vocabulary teaching.