Research On College English Polysemy Teaching Strategies From The Perspective Of The Related Theories Of Category

Vocabulary teaching plays the most essential part in college English teaching,As is known to all,vocabulary is one of the most three important elements(pronunciation,vocabulary,grammar)in a language.Without enough knowledge of vocabulary,one could not conduct proper listening,speaking,reading and writing.What's more,the polysemy teaching is the one of the most important parts of English vocabulary teaching.And polysemy is very common in any languages,especially in English,polysemic words account for more than seventy percent of vocabulary,based on the previous studies.The importance of polysemy teaching has begun to be recognized.However,many problems still remain at vocabulary teaching in this country.First,some college English teachers pay too much attention only to enlarging vocabulary size,but not to thorough understanding and mastery of vocabulary,and less emphasis is laid on the sense teaching in depth.Second,under the influence of the structuralism,the link between the word and the sense is regarded as arbitrary and random.As the polysemy teaching mainly focuses on the memorizing the senses by rote,the teaching of process of the senses in depth is insufficient and long-term retention is not satisfactory.Moreover,many teachers lay much emphasis on the text explanation and ignore the specific polysemy teaching part,which makes the students not well aware of which are the polysemes.Generally,two kinds of polysemy teaching are popular in college English vocabulary teaching.The first is that the teacher explains every sense of polysemy separately but does not pay attention to the relationship among these different senses.The second one is that the teacher explains every sense of polysemy equally but does not emphasize the importance of the core sense.The students could not well acquire the polysemy with too many senses with either of the teaching method.Due to the fact that vocabulary acquisition plays an important role in learning English,many researches have been done much on vocabulary and less on polysemy,and some are on learning and teaching strategies from different perspectives,including those in semantics,structuralism,cognitive psychology,cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics.Fortunately,modern category and its related theories have been worked out,and,based on human cognitive ability and through categorization is obtained a category,their properties and universal relations among them,and based on its related theories,a semantic category is obtained,reflecting a logical relation within the different senses of an entry in human mind.Hence,it is reasonable hunch that vocabulary learning and teaching may be improved if category and its related theories are made use of in understanding the formation of lexical meanings and their relations.However,most of the researches are theoretical exploration.There are not many empirical studies on the polysemy teaching strategies.Furthermore,even fewer have been dug out for gratifying efficient polysemy teaching strategies.Hence,it is of natural logic and great value to combine the prototype related theories with the practice of the polysemy teaching and explore further to find an a lot proper way for the Chinese college English students.This thesis focuses on the problems of the difficulty of teaching English polysemy,under the background of the present situation of polysemy learning and teaching,applying the category theory and its related theories including ICM,metaphor theory and metonymy theory to the polysemy teaching.With college non-English majors as the subjects,the thesis aims to experiment and work out an effective polysemy teaching method(model).There are two classes,namely,the control class and the experimental class,in this study.Different teaching methods are applied lasting about twelve weeks.The results of the tests,questionnaire,the data like the mean and sample T-Test will be analyzed via statistical software SPSS16.0.The thesis mainly aims to solve the following three questions:1)What is the current situation of English polysemy teaching strategies to the Chinese college non-English major students(situational question)?2)How does the model of English polysemy teaching and training obtained after category theory and its related theories affect polysemy teaching work?3)What teaching strategy model and learning strategies could be gotten from the perspective of category theory and its related theories to promote the polysemy and vocabulary learning ability?Through the empirical research,the major findings are listed as following:According to the questionnaire and the two interviews,most of the students find it is extremely hard to learn polysemy.The present way of polysemy acquisition and teaching is no much different from that of vocabulary acquisition the same as monosemic words,which lay much emphasis on rote memorization and repetition.For the eager students,they have spent quite a lot time on polysemy,but the outcome is not satisfactory.What is worse is that students are hardly familiar with the category theory and its related theories.Most of the college English teachers still apply the traditional method more or less in polysemy teaching.Cognitive linguistic way in teaching English has almost not been introduced to the college English polysemy teaching.The students have long been struggling with the polysemy acquisition.Considering the significance,many students have spent so much time and make every effort to get a better result.So the students are quite willing to accept and participate in the new way of vocabulary teaching.They are open to cooperate.All the above comes to a conclusion that the cognitive way of teaching is supposed to be one of the most popular and effective way in polysemy teaching.According to the experiment,application of cognitive linguistic theories in the teaching could promote the performance of students in polysemy acquisition.The polysemy teaching from the perspective of category theory and its related theories makes the students have a better retention than the traditional polysemy teaching.According to the data got from SPSS 16.0,both the students at EC and CC obtain a much better result on the test after their applying the cognitive way of polysemy learning.The average scores of the two classes are improved more than 15 points,which is definitely a well worthy effort.Besides,the interests of the students are simulated and the confidences of polysemy learning and English learning are built,which makes the students feel there is a bight future waiting for them.This study aims to explore the new way of polysemy teaching strategy for the non-English major students and the way of applying the category theory and its related theories into polysemy teaching.The author sincerely hopes that this study will contribute to the college English teaching and also help the college student in polysemy learning.