A Research On English Polysemy Teaching From The Perspective Of Prototype Theory

’Without grammar, very little can be conveyed, without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed.’D. A. Wilkins once said. Obviously, the priority of the vocabulary can be seen from this. Teachers put much more efforts to help students’ vocabulary amount and vocabulary competence in their English vocabulary teaching, but the results are far from perfect. Even after mastering certain amount of words and training the strategies of reading, the students may still have problems in understanding a test. The students know the word, but their knowledge cannot help them get the exact understanding in a certain context. That is because the existence of the words have a number of related senses, which we called them polyseme.Polysemy is a common phenomenon in almost all languages. Different linguists of different schools explain the process of polysemous words formed with quite different methods. The early structuralism and its teaching emphasize the internal structure of polysemy and isolate the meaning from the external world, such as human experiences and different cultures. So it could not give a satisfactory and full explanation of polysemy and the teaching.This thesis intended to improve the teaching methods for polysemy teaching based on the Prototype Category Theory. The present study made an experiment on the students in Heilongjaing East College. Questionnaire and vocabulary tests are used as the main instrum ents, followed by the statistical analyses conducted with SPSS19.0and Excel. The present study aims to explore the polysemous word learning strategies used by college students, th e effect of the teaching method based on the prototype theory on polysemy teaching.The thesis consists of six chapters. Chapter One is an introduction, which elucidates the current situation of polysemy learning in China. The purpose and the significance of the study are laid out. Chapter Two offers a review of the previous studies and present study of polysemy in and outside China. Chapter Three is the theoretical foundation, prototype theory and the category. Chapter Four introduces the methodology of the present research, which include the experiments, reliability and validity of the instruments, and data collection and data analysis. Chapter Five presents the results and discussions of the results through analyzing the data by using SPSS19.0and Excel. Chapter Six is a conclusion in which major findings of the researches, implication and limitations of the researches are presented, followed the suggestions for further research in sequence.Based on the statistical analyses, the following conclusions will be obtained:The most often used strategies on polysemous word learning is cognitive strategy; the prototypical meaning is more helpful for guessing the figurative meaning of a polysemous word correctly; teaching method based on the prototype theory could get a better effect on polysemous word acquisition. It proved that core meanings will help the students learn polysemous words better and quicker and it provides reasons and great significance to the further investigation to the issue.