On Applying Iconicity Theory In Teaching English Vocabulary To EFL Learners In Senior High Schools

Vocabulary teaching is an integral part of language teaching. For Chinese EFL students,the senior middle school is an important stage of learning. When students enter into the initialperiod of learning English in the senior middle school, many of them get stuck in thesuddenly increasing new words and phrases, which constitute a bottleneck for their Englishlearning. In2001when a new round of teaching reform was introduced, the New Criteria forSenior High School English Curriculum issued by the Ministry of Education of China putforward a higher requirement for vocabulary teaching and learning. It is a new challenge tosenior middle school English vocabulary teaching, and meanwhile it means also a chance forimproving. The subject of how to improve the efficiency of vocabulary teaching and learningneeds urgent study. Since1980s, with the development of Cognitive Linguistics, the iconicityissue of language has attracted popular attention from scholars at home and abroad inlinguistics and applied linguistics. Quite a number of linguists have studied iconicity withregard to such aspects of natural language as phonetics, vocabulary, grammar, text, and so on,the achievements of which conclude that iconicity plays an important role in those differentaspects of language.The present study is concerned with applying the theory of iconicity, specially thelexicon iconicity, to the senior middle school English vocabulary teaching. The researchquestion of the study is whether the vocabulary teaching informed by iconicity reaps betterperformance in teaching English vocabulary to the EFL students compared with thosetraditional ways, and it also touches the teachers’ strategies of teaching English vocabularyand the students’ strategies of learning English vocabulary, as well as the teachers’ knowledgeregarding iconicity theory and its application. The object of study includes the senior highmiddle school students and teachers. Specifically, the study selects two first year (2011)classes as the experimental class and the control class with94students in all and11Englishteachers in Yantai City No.3Middle School. The research methods employed in the studyincludes literature research and empirical research methods, the later of which involves hereinterviews (for teachers), questionnaire (for students), and teaching experiment tests. The teaching experiment lasts a term in the first year with four months and two tests are held at thebeginning and the end of the term respectively.The main findings of the study include: application of the iconicity theory to teachingEnglish vocabulary to Chinese EFL students in the senior high middle school is positive to theperformance of the teaching to some extent, and English vocabulary teaching informed by theiconicity theory can enhance in a certain degree the students’ interest in learning Englishvocabulary and improve their strategies for the learning, which can ultimately produce betterresults of teaching and learning English vocabulary. Few of the interviewed English teachershave ever studied academic works on the relation between word forms and their meanings,and heard about the term of iconicity. On the whole, they lack in systematic knowledge in thisregard. In routine teaching work, however, they have indeed used some teaching methodsrelevant with iconicity principles, and in teaching methods, they tend to employ suchtraditional methods as follow-me reading, reciting, writing from memory, etc., and alsomethods of teaching words based on situational contexts. On the part of the students, theyhave unexpectedly used various methods, which display flexibility, and basically mechanicalmemorizing has not been their main way of learning English vocabulary.