The Application Of Image Schema Theory In Senior English Vocabulary Teaching

As the fundamental material of building up a language, vocabulary plays a very important role in communication and thus becomes the central part of English teaching. The new criterion of English course in senior middle school makes a greater demand on vocabulary teaching, and it focuses not only on the increase of “quantities” but also the improvement of “qualities”. Nevertheless, the present state of vocabulary teaching is not optimistic, it is generally believed by students that vocabulary learning is “time consuming with low efficiency” while teachers hold the ideas that vocabulary teaching costs “more efforts with less effects”. Thus, how to improve vocabulary teaching performance and vocabulary learning methods becomes the concerning problem for both researchers at home and abroad.The boosting development of cognitive linguistics provides wholly new viewing angles for language research. It is regarded that “cognition” is an intermediate zone between language and objective world. Cognitive linguistics mainly focuses on the relationship between human cognitive ability and language itself that helps to provide theoretical basis to English teaching from a perspective of cognition. Image Schema is the results of combination of image processing device in human brains and the already known messages or concepts in our mind. Image Schema embodies abstract conceptions and manifests them by highly summarized concrete images, so as to reveal the meanings which appears to be independent but actually related to each other.In the thesis, cognitive theory and image schema theory provide the theoretical basis. Taking senior English vocabulary teaching as breaking through point and adopting both quantitative and qualitative methods to develop a serious teaching experiments, this paper aims at testing the hypotheses “ whether the application of image schema theory in vocabulary teaching could enhance the senior English vocabulary teaching performance” and “whether the application of image schema theory in vocabulary teaching could enhance students’ interests in English vocabulary learning”. The subject of the research are the students from two classes of grade 2 in a senior middle school of Tangshan City. The research develops a vocabulary teaching experiment based on the image schema theory for one semester in experimental class, and the data analysis shows that the experimental class which had accepted image schema approach is superior to control class and the new method is welcomed by the students. It is also hoped that the thesis could produce some benefits for future vocabulary teaching.