A Study Of Vocabulary Teaching Based On Iconicity In Senior High School

Iconicity theory is an important part of the study of cognitive linguistics, which got general attention by linguists both at home and abroad. Iconicity principle put forward by Pierce was a great challenge and supplement of arbitrariness theory proposed by the founder of modern linguistics Saussure. It can play a positive role in having a better understanding of language and an optimization of language teaching.As English linguistic(Wilkins, 1972) said without vocabulary, nothing can be conveyed. It spoke out the importance of vocabulary in language teaching. Through deep understanding of human language, people realized that vocabulary is one of the important elements of language. Therefore, vocabulary is very important in people’s communication and is also an important part of language teaching and learning.This study intends to apply the iconicity rules to English vocabulary teaching.It aims at finding out whether iconicity can improve the subjects’ vocabulary aquisition and subjects’ perception of iconicity-based instruction in lexical. The subjects involved in this study were 85 senior high school students enrolled in 2015 in No. 7school of Liaoning province. An experiment was conducted by dividing the subjects into control group and experimental group.The data-collection instruments in the study involved questionnaires, interview and tests. The scores of students both in EC and CC were put into SPSS(22.0) and analyzed. According to the results, it can be seen that the iconicity-based instruction can help students make improvements in their vocabulary learning and provide students better understanding of words.Based on the results and findings, the study presented implications of teaching and suggestions for further researches by using iconicity-based instruction in lexical level.