An Empirical Study In Junior Middle School Vocabulary Teaching:A Perspective Of Conceptual Fluency

Vocabularies are the basic elements of a language.The differences between Chinese and Western culture reflect more on the vocabularies. So the vocabulary teaching is an important link of foreign language teaching.The English vocabulary teaching in middle schools should not only focus on the forms, grammar structure and the referential meanings of words,but also on the concept and culture which vocabulary carries. It is the underlying structure of the vocabularies. Only when the students master these, can they truly keep words learnt in mind and use them flexibly and properly. Faced with the phenomena under which students feel boring or dull, whenever they learn vocabulary, Danesi comes up with the Conceptual Fluency, which means to map the surface structure of a target language with the underlying structure. Generally, the traditional vocabulary teaching stresses the pronunciations, meanings and phonetic alphabet spelling method or root memory method to remember words. These methods take effect to some extent but the results are not so obvious. However, the Conceptual Fluency can instruct the teacher to help the students to understand the concept that the vocabularies carry. Concept is a kind of cognitive way. The students will learn better,especially the polysemies and idioms when they are taught by the cognitive linguistics.Since it is necessary for the learners to realize the fluency of concept in vocabulary teaching by concept reconstruction and concept reconstruction is the core of achieving Concept Fluency. Moreover, concept error can’t be avoided easily in the process of concept reconstruction. For this,the author decides to explore the ways to achieve Concept Fluency from the perspective of how to achieve concept reconstruction and how to avoid concept error. The author designs a teaching experiment in which the teachers teach in two ways called root metaphor and culture introduction. By means of the two ways,the students can effectively realize how to use these two methods to achieve concept reconstruction and avoid concept error and finally achieve Concept Fluency and have a good master of English words.