A Study On The Depth Of The L2Vocabulary Production

With the long-term influence of Saussure’s Structuralist Linguistics, foreign languageteaching in China, with the guidance of the theory that the combination between form andmeaning of the word is arbitrary, ignores teaching the motivation of words, and leads to“time-consuming teaching with low proficiency” of L2vocabulary of college students. It isessential to explore a teaching method that can help improve the depth of productivevocabulary of the college students. Cognitive Linguistics grounded on the Empiricismbelieves that Conceptual Metaphor is the mapping of a concept from the familiar domain tothe unknown, and emphasizes the importance of Image Schema and the basic daily lifeexperience in the cognition. This research with the guidance of the theory of Lakoff&Johnson’s Conceptual Metaphor and Nation’s theory of framework on vocabularyproduction, proposes a hypothesis that L2vocabulary teaching method based on conceptualmetaphor can improve the learner’s vocabulary production depth significantly, and verify itwith the paradigm of contrast of experiment. The subject of the research is the students from2classes of Grade2012in Chuzhou University who major in Chinese Education. Theresearcher develops a vocabulary teaching experiment based on the conceptual metaphortheory for1semester in class1, and the data analysis shows that the teaching method playsa significant role in improving the learners’ L2vocabulary production depth. And themethod is well accepted by the college students. In order to improve the L2vocabularyproduction depth gradually, teachers should set up the system thinking in the teachingpractice, adhere to the hypothesis of cost/benefit, and cultivate the college students to bewell-grounded.