A Study On College Vocabulary Teaching Under Category Theory

D.A. Wilkins (1972) has described:“There is no grammar, information can not be fullyexpressed; no words, the information is completely unable to express.” Vocabulary is animportant part of the language. When students learn English, has become a bottleneck in theirlearning process. Most of the students memorize the English vocabulary mechanically, andthey are lack of skills and methods to remember them. The teacher only teaches the meaningand pronunciation of the words, then let the students memorize after class. They ignore theimportance of vocabulary teaching, thus appear a time-consuming and inefficient condition.This has a serious impact on the students to achieve a good result in English examination.With the development of cognitive linguistics, people begin to pay more attention to thecategory theory. In this article, the experimenter helped students to build semantic networksthrough the prototype category theory and basic level category theory. And established thecategory tree structures for helping students connect the meanings of the words together tomemorize them. This will also improve the efficiency of the English teaching.In this paper, there are eighty sophomore students selected from the history departmentof the Shanxi Normal University. The author divided them into experimental group andcontrol group. In the experimental group, the teacher taught the students by the categorytheory, including the prototype category theory, basic level category theory, superordinateand subordinate category theory to build a semantic network. Then the students learn to builda category tree structure to remember the words; while the control group learn vocabulary inthe traditional way. The teacher explained the words through the interpretation, makingsentences, conversion of the words. The author carried out a pretest before the teaching. Aftera month of English vocabulary teaching took a posttest. Next take a delayed test in the latertwo weeks. The data access into the SPSS16.0for the descriptive analysis, and independentsample analysis to verify if the category theory is helpful for college students in the English vocabulary teaching and learning? After a period of time, is this kind of method is stillhelpful for the college students to memorize words or not?The study found that the scores of the experimental group are higher than the controlgroup, no matter in the posttest, or the delayed test scores. While the control group also makeimprovement in the posttest and delayed test, but much less than the experimental group. Thisconfirms that the category theory is really helpful for the college students to memorize theEnglish vocabulary. After a period of time, when the students are proficient at this methodand draw the category tree structure by themselves, the effect will be better.