The Application Of Cognitive Linguistics To English Vocabulary Teaching To Children

With the implementation of the new English Curriculum Standard issued by the National Ministry of Education, English has become a required course in all primary school officially. In a decade years of practice, the acquisition of English vocabulary is the hard nut to crack and English teachers feel confused to teach vocabulary to children. In order to prevail over the dilemma, we need to explore an effective and feasible approach for English vocabulary teaching, which caters to the psychological and physical development of children.Good teaching methods are necessarily based on theories of language learning. Cognitive linguistics holds that language is the product of both reality and cognition. Therefore, it is better to explain language from the perspective of embodiment and study language from the aspects of people's cognitive ability and bodily experience towards the world. Because English vocabulary teaching in its nature, is a process of cognitive process of information, the application of the cognitive linguistics would value the experience and the interaction of the pupils. And the pupils would learn the language from a very new perspective. Based on the cognitive linguistics, the thesis mainly discusses the application to vocabulary teaching specifically combined with the characteristics of the development of children. The framework of the thesis is as follows:Chapter one is the introduction of the thesis. Chapter two sketches the development and the overall views of Cognitive Linguistic; Chapter three illustrates the theories which are to be applied in the thesis so as to make a theoretical base for the later chapters. Considering the children are different from the adult learners, the author produces some principles which should be abided by in chapter four.Chapter five discusses the application of the cognitive linguistics to English vocabulary teaching. The"embodied experience"theory functions as the guiding principle for the ways of the presentation and practice of new vocabulary; the basic level theory provides a theoretical reference for word selection for children at primary stage. In the light of the prototype theory and the iconicity theory, the thesis introduces some interesting ways to memorize words with ease. The gestalt theory is also of referential value to children vocabulary in that it offers the theoretical reference for teaching of the lexical chunks and the letter combination. Chapter six is an experiment conducted to verify the effect of the application of the cognitive theories to children vocabulary teaching. The results of the experiment reveal that the application of cognitive theories into vocabulary teaching could increase the pupils'mastery in vocabulary. Though the cognitive linguistics theories are very abstract and beyond the comprehension of the children, but the concrete application of the theories to word-memorization demonstrated by teacher is quite easy to understand. The pupils can not only comprehend what is going on in the class, they can also apply the same method to their study autonomously.