An Experimental Study Of The Application Of Categorization In EFL Vocabulary Learning

This thesis is an empirical one investigating the validity of applications of cognitivecategorization theories, especially prototype theory and basic-level category theory invocabularyteaching.Experiment1is a vocabulary teaching research,40postgraduate students majored intranslation in grade one were selected as subjects. They were divided into experimental groupand control group randomly,20each, and were asked to learn60target new words. For theexperimental group, words were designed on the basis of prototypical hierarchical structure andtaught with the help of prototype model instruction, while for the control group, words werelisted randomly and taught in a traditional way. After the vocabulary test, data were input intothe computer and calculated by program SPSS, results showed that the average score ofexperimental group is47.4, on the contrary, the average score of control group is only39.4.Independent sample t-test indicted significant difference between these two groups for p=.002＜.05, in favor of experimental group. In addition,60target words could fall into4kinds ofapplications of prototype theory. The most encouraging result appeared in the model ofprototypical affixes and roots vocabulary teaching (p=.001), but there was no differencebetween experimental group and control group under prototypical pronunciation rule model (p=.347＞.05).Experiment2probed to the vocabulary output of adult English learners.27adult Englishlearners were asked to write down as many “s” beginning words like “student” as they could inonly3minutes. After that, all the words would be labeled according to The Graded Vocabularyat Elementary Stage of College and transited into SPSS. Calculation result suggested that adultESL learners rely very much on basic-level words for the proportion of basic-level terms outputreachedup to70.26%. As thelevelwenthigher, theirvocabularyoutputdecreasedrapidly.From the statistical results presented, the author regards categorization theories, especiallyprototype theory and basic-level category theory as a very critical instructive and effectivevocabulary pedagogical method. With the employment of cognitive categorization theories,learners would yield twice the result with half effort. Therefore, the author recommend teachers master some teaching strategies, properly arrange the orders of vocabulary teaching, and installa bestwayofapplicationof teaching newwords.