An Empirical Study Of Improving English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High Schools By Iconicity Theory

Vocabulary,which plays a very important role in language system,is the basic component of language unit and the foundation of the language learning.Vocabulary teaching strategy is valued by scholars more and more,and different kinds of vocabulary learning strategy emerged,such as lexical chunk teaching,intercultural communicative teaching,vocabulary memory strategies and so on.From the perspective of cognitive linguistics,the process of naming,classifying and learning the external entity and language words is the cognitive process of language categorization.At present,the research achievements of cognitive linguistics have been widely applied in foreign language teaching.Among them,the iconicity of the cognitive linguistics,which has received widespread attention both at home and abroad,is an important subject of the study of cognitive linguistics.Iconicity theory emphasizes that the relationship between the linguistic form and the meaning is motivated.Thus,it is a meaningful attempt to have a meaningful learning and remembering according to the relations.With the theoretical guidance of iconicity,this study elaborates the application of phonetic iconicity,morphological iconicity and semantic iconicity in vocabulary teaching in senior high school.It proposes a hypothesis that “the iconicity theory can improve the effectiveness of the English vocabulary teaching in senior high schools”,and verifies it with an experiment.It takes 120 students from two parallel classes in grade one in a senior high school in Yingtan city as the study subjects.During the three months,iconicity theory is put into the experimental class,class 7,while the traditional teaching methods are utilized in control class,class 6,such as phonic teaching,context teaching,intensive language training,etc.After studying for three months,the research results show that the average score of experimental class is 4.4333 higher than that of control class at the posttest.In the independent sample T-test analysis,it shows that P=0.035<0.050.It proves that the scores of experimental class are significantly higher than that of control class.Moreover,thevocabulary scores in experimental class have been improved significantly.Therefore,iconicity theory has certain application value in English vocabulary teaching in senior high schools.Based on the research above,the author concludes that the iconicity theory can improve the effectiveness of the English vocabulary teaching in senior high schools.