Application Of Metonymy In Dispelling The Phenomenon Of English Lexical "Fossilization" Of Senior High School Students

According to the New English Curriculum Standards published by the Ministry of Education,higher requirements are set for senior students to master much more words.Therefore,it’s important to master a certain number of vocabularies for the students.In recent years,with the increasing attention to the English vocabulary teaching,the teaching effect of the traditional vocabulary teaching is unsatisfactory.And one serious problem has been discovered,which is the lexical fossilization.The concept of “fossilization” was firstly proposed by Larry Selinker in 1972 which gets wide acceptance by scholars in the field of second language acquisition(SLA)throughout the world.Fossilization refers to the failure of the usage of a language form to achieve the target language standards,and maintain the level of stagnation in foreign language acquisition.In lexical fossilization,two aspects are included.First,students’ vocabulary size is difficult to expand.Second,all the meanings of the word can’t be mastered by the students.Up till the present moment,this phenomenon is very common in senior high schools,which seriously hinders the students’ improvement.Therefore,how to dispel the lexical fossilization and improve the students’ vocabulary learning situation has become a great challenge to the English vocabulary teaching in senior high schools.The present study of applying the approach of metonymy to dispel the English lexical fossilization is based on the Idealized Cognitive Models and Spreading Activation Model,combined with the author’s one semester of educational practice,employed literature study,combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis and experimental study.The study will be conducted centering around three questions: 1)Whether metonymy can dispel high school students’ lexical fossilization? 2)How can metonymy be applied to dispel the phenomenon of fossilization in vocabulary learning? 3)Whether metonymy can help to stimulate students’ interest in learning vocabulary?The results of the experiment show that it is feasible to apply metonymy to dispel the phenomenon of English lexical fossilization for senior high school students.On the one hand,the study may help provide some enlightments for frontline teachers,help teachers change the irrational way of vocabulary teaching,enhance their teaching skills and turn the mechanical and boring classroom into a lively classroom atmosphere.On the other hand,the study may help enlarge their vocabulary size,to improve the memory of the word meanings and cultivate their interest of learning vocabulary.Last but not least,the study hopes it can provide some references to the English vocabulary teaching in senior high schools in theory.