An Empirical Study On The Application Of Prototype Category Theory To English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School

V ocabulary is an indispensable component of language learning. The num ber of vocabulary that one m asters will certainly affect his lan guage level. Vocabulary acquisition is thought to be the m ost difficult item for senior high school students. Therefore, it is necessary to find a set of scientific and efficient English vocabulary teaching approaches to enrich stud ents’ vocabulary. The study attempts to do the research on applying the Prototype Category Theory to vocabulary teaching in senior high school. Prototype Category Theory consid ers that the prototype for one word is the item which is a good and clear example, and other items are extended around it. It emphasizes the relationship between central items and peripheral items.Based on prototype category th eory in cognitive linguistics, this thesis performs an empirical study on senior high school vocabu lary teaching. The research questions of the paper are listed as follows:1. Can the application of prototype cat egory theory to vocabulary teaching improve students’ vocabulary proficiency?2. Can the application of prototype catego ry theory to vocabulary teach ing improve students’ short-term memory or long-term memory?3. Can the application of prototype cat egory theory to vocabulary teaching stimulate students’ interests to vocabulary learning?The method of this research is empirical method. From No.1 high school in Jinzhou, two classes of Grade 2 are selected. One class is selected as experim ental class, and the other class is selected as c ontrol class. This expe riment lasts fourteen weeks. At the end of th e experiment, according to the analysis of experimental data, the conclusions of research questions are found.All data are collected from the experiment and analyzed by SPS S 11.5. The students in the two classes are asked to finish Questionnaire I. According to Questionnaire I, the author gets the current condition of English vocabulary learning in senior high school. The teacher teaches vocabulary by applying Prototype Category Theory in English voca bulary teaching in the EC. And at the sam e time the teach er teaches the students by trad itional vocabulary teaching method in CC. After the first class, the students in EC and CC are immediately required to finish the immediate test. In the first class of the second week, the students in EC and the CC are required to finish the delayed test. In the last w eek of the experiment, the students in two classes are required to finish the post-test. And the s tudents in EC are asked to finish Questionnaire II to investigate whether the new vocabulary teaching method stimulate students’ interests to vocabulary learning.According to the results of the experiment, first, the teaching m ethod based on Prototype Category Theory can improve students’ vocabulary proficiency. Second, the teaching method based on Prototype Category Theory can im prove both short-term memory and long-term memory. Finally, the teaching method based on Prototy pe Category Theory can stimulate students’ interests to vocabulary learning.The thesis includes five chapters. The first chapter is introduction, the research background, the purpose, sign ificance and outline of the study are included in this chapter. The second chapter is literature review containing introduction of Prototype Category Theory at hom e and abroad, as well as se veral related theoretical foundations. The third chapter is m ethodology, this chapter incl udes the research questions, the participants, instruments and also presents the procedure of the research. The fourth chapter is the resu lts and data analyses, com prising collected data an d analyzed results. The last chapter is the conc lusion, the author states the m ajor findings, concludes the limitations and points out further suggestions.