A Study On English Vocabulary Teaching In Vocational And Technical College Based On The Prototype Theory

Vocabulary is the essential elements of language.There is not a language which does not have the words.However,vocabulary teaching is not paid much attention on the language teaching.It is usually based on the students' effort after the class.The teachers mostly use the traditional method to teach the vocabulary which leads the students to think vocabulary learning is a tedious and difficult task.Regarding to the current psychological cognition and attitude,the researcher take Prototype Theory as the basis and tries to solve the following two questions: 1)What is the students' attitude and autonomy toward vocabulary learning after the application of Prototype Theory on vocabulary teaching? 2)Can Prototype Theory help students improve vocabulary size and depth of word comprehension?In order to solve two questions,the researcher did the experiment in Grade one in vocational college.The experiment includes two classes which are the control class and the experimental class.In the control class,the teacher teaches the vocabulary in the way of reading firstly,explaining the meaning and usages,giving the example sentence and doing the exercises.In the experimental class,the teacher adopts the method which is based on Prototype Theory.The teacher regards the words what the students are learning as the prototype and expand the related words to build up the semantic network.In this method,the students cannot forget the words easily and understand the words better.The researcher adopts the methodology including the questionnaire,pre-test,post-test and interview.According to the results ofquestionnaire and interview,we can know the attitude and autonomy in the experimental class improved.With the help of the SPSS17.0,the researcher compares the scores of the two tests.The researcher finds that the students' vocabulary size and the depth of the words comprehension are much higher than the ones in the control class.So the vocabulary teaching in prototype theory has a positive effect on students' attitude,autonomy,vocabulary size and the depth of word comprehension.