Extracurricular English Vocabulary Teaching Approach At Junior High School:from The Perspective Of Language Cognition

Extracurricular English learning is a useful supplement and improvement to regular English learning at junior high school and it plays an important role in English learning for students. However, it does not attract enough attention from scholars at home and abroad. Small class teaching is the remarkable characteristic of extracurricular English teaching, so it is much easier for teachers to observe and respect students’differences and teach them according to their differences to improve the teaching efficiency. Effective vocabulary teaching is the basis and important part of both regular English teaching and extracurricular English teaching, so it is of great importance for English teachers to do research about how to scientifically and effectively teach vocabulary in extracurricular English teaching at junior high school. It can not only help students to master a large number of vocabulary, but also integrate extracurricular English learning with regular English learning at school and facilitate students’long term memory.Cognitive Linguistics, which began in the 1970s, is an emerging interdisciplinary field combined cognitive science and linguistics together. The basic theories of cognitive linguistics are based on the research on philosophy and cognitive psychology. Among them, Prototype Theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory can be applied to guide the vocabulary teaching and to improve the efficiency of vocabulary teaching. In addition, corpus can provide authentic language materials for students. Guided by cognitive linguistics and assisted by corpus linguistics, the author of this paper wants to make an exploratory research on the following vocabulary teaching methods in order to improve the efficiency of vocabulary teaching methods of extracurricular English. These methods include presenting language materials by Corpus, categorizing basic-level category terms, establishing semantic categories based on Prototype Theory and constructing extended meanings guided by Conceptual Metaphor Theory. These methods are interrelated with each other instead of being independent of each other. The author of this paper also applies these methods to practical teaching to further testify whether they can facilitate students’ vocabulary learning and long term memory.This empirical research uses the method of convenience sampling. Two classes are chosen from Maria Education and Training Institution. One is randomly selected as the experimental class (EC) and the other is as the control class (CC). There are 16 students in the two classes respectively. The students are taught by the same teacher with the same teaching materials, New Concept English II, and the same teaching progress. The EC is taught with the vocabulary teaching methods based on Prototype Theory, Conceptual Metaphor Theory and self-constructed corpus, while the CC is taught with the traditional methods. The experiment lasted for 24 weeks. By the means of statistics software SPSS 19.0, the author makes a scientific analysis on the statistics of the questionnaires and the tests. The results show that the application of Prototype Category Theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory can not only improve students’vocabulary proficiency more effectively than the traditional teaching methods, but also facilitate students’ long-term memory of vocabulary. In addition, the results from the post-test questionnaire show that the students in the EC take a positive attitude to the vocabulary teaching methods based on Prototype Theory and Conceptual Metaphor Theory.