An Empirical Study Of Cognitive Motivation Based Instruction Of English Idioms At Vocational College

As an integral part of the English vocabulary, idioms are considered as the vitamin or the life and soul of the language. Idioms teaching, is also an indispensable part of English teaching at vocational college, which can enhance students’understanding of the culture, geography, and customs of English countries and to improve students’ listening, reading, speaking and writing skills effectively, thus promoting interpersonal communication with others. However, it has always been considered to be a hard nut to crack in the foreign language teaching.The emphasis of this study is laid on idioms teaching and learning of vocational college students and attempts to apply the cognitive linguistics theory into idiom instruction with the intention of probing into a new way of instructing idioms at vocational college. According to Lakoff&Johnson (1980:35), idioms, motivated at least on the basis of the three cognitive mechanisms, that is, conceptual metaphors, concept of metonymy and conventional knowledge. Under the guidance of this theory and previous researches, the author conducted an idiom teaching experiment based on the three cognitive mechanisms to prove that the positive effect of this theory applied in idiom teaching practice in comparison with traditional teaching method. This research is an experimental research, adopting a combination of quantitative and qualitative analyses. The study is carried out between two parallel classes from business English majors as an experimental class (EC) and control class (CC) for a teaching period of18weeks. The instruction for EC is based on cognitive motivation analysis and training, while traditional teaching method is used in CC as usual. The whole experiment consists of the questionnaire, pre-test, the teaching process, in-class test and post-test. After all the raw data are collected, the results are calculated by SPSS16.0.Results of experimental data show that there exists significant difference between the experimental class and control class after contrastive teaching, thus confirming the feasibility of the theory of cognitive mechanisms in idioms teaching and it can improve the students idiom acquisition effectively.This thesis explores a tentative idiom instruction at vocational college by the application of cognitive linguistic theory. Some implications concerning idiom teaching are offered for future teaching activities.However, on account of the limitations of present study, such as the time span and research design, further exploration is also necessary.