A Study Of English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High Schools From The Perspective Of Frame Theory

Vocabulary is acknowledged as a fundamental and essential element of language.Teachers and students have recognized the significance of vocabulary in Englishlanguage teaching， and both parties have devoted much effort to it. However,vocabulary has still been a headache for teachers and students. This is, to some degree,due to the ignorance of senior high school students· cognitive characteristics in theprocess of English vocabulary teaching.Frame is a cognitive concept, proposed by Fillmore. It is a schematization ofexperience (a conceptual structure), represented at the conceptual level and held in longterm memory. It relates elements and entities associated with a particular culturallyembedded scene, situation or event from human experience. As far as the cognitivecapacity for senior high school students are concerned, they have already had arelatively complete schematization of experience. The investigation carried in this thesissuggests that the frame plays an important role in English vocabulary teaching.Fillmore·s frame theory claims the important functions of encyclopedicknowledge and people·s experience in understanding and building lexical meanings. Itis significant to English vocabulary teaching. Based on the findings of the investigation,Brown and Payne·s five-step vocabulary teaching model as well as Qian Deming andZhou Qingfang·s three-stage model for English vocabulary teaching, this thesis studiesthe advantages of applying frame theory to English vocabulary teaching, explores a newthree-stage model for senior high school vocabulary teaching and presents a sampleinstructional design based on the new three-stage model.The advantages of applying frame theory to English vocabulary teaching in seniorhigh schools are cultivating students·cultural awareness, enlarging students·vocabulary, helping students distinguish synonyms, helping students identify the specific meaningfor polysemy, and helping students improve long term memory. The three-stage modelfor senior high school vocabulary teaching includes three stages: namely, thepre-framing stage, the framing stage and the post-framing stage. At the pre-framingstage, teachers are to help students to activate some specific frames by virtue ofbackground knowledge and context information. At the framing stage, teachers are toguide students to identify, describe and analyze some specific frames, so that studentscan understand the lexical meaning and know how to use the word. At the post-framingstage, teachers guide students to consolidate the new words by means of some assignedexercises.