An Empirical Study Of English Vocabulary Teaching Based On The Theory Of Iconicity In Junior High Schools

Vocabulary teaching is very important in junior high school.All sorts of English exams put a high value on vocabulary application.However,the vocabulary teaching in traditional ways is simple and boring,totally ignoring students' interest.It's difficult for the students to memorize the new words in class.What's worse,the students can't remember the new words even after spending lots of time after class.As a consequence,the students lack interest in learning English.This deservedly leads to the declining of the students' learning scores.In recent years,the teachers have gradually realized the importance of the ways of vocabulary teaching.And they are trying to change the methods of vocabulary teaching.At the same time,the iconicity theory has been utilized by more and more teachers.But the empirical researches based on the theory of iconicity in the application of English teaching in junior high schools are few.In this thesis,we applied Gestalt psychology,Cognitive learning theory and Constructivism learning theory to probe into English vocabulary teaching based on the theory of iconicity in junior high school,and adopted the questionnaire,interview,observation and tests to explore the questions as follows:1)What is the impact of vocabulary teaching based on the theory oficonicity on the students' learning interest?2)What is the impact of vocabulary teaching based on the theory of iconicity on the students' utilizing of vocabulary?In this thesis,the researcher chose two parallel classes of Junior Two from Baogai Junior High School in Hengnan county,Hunan Province as the experimental subjects.The experimental class adopted the theory of iconicity to teach the vocabulary,the control class still used the traditional vocabulary teaching method.The research used questionnaire,classroom observation,interview and tests to collect data.The researcher conducted an analysis of the data by adopting the Independent-Samples T Test and the Paired-Samples T Test.The following findings of the study can be concluded: First,because of using the iconicity theory to teach the vocabulary,the students from experimental class took a great interest in learning English.They can answer questions actively in class.What's more,they have creative thoughts,and always think about and classify the related words.While students from the control class were silent,a few of the students even felt sleepy in class.Second,students from the experimental class improved their scores of post-test evidently comparing with pre-test,while students' scores from the control class weren't improved distinctly comparing with pre-test.So,the vocabulary teaching based on the theory of iconicity can not only stimulate students' learning interest but also improve students' ability of the vocabulary application.Due to the all kinds of restrictions,the research has two main limitations;First,the experiment only lasted 4 months,it's not long enough.Second,the experimental subjects are only junior high school students,and of no good universality.The expectations are as follows:First,the iconicity theory can not only be used in vocabulary teaching but in grammar teaching and discourse teaching.Second,the experimental subjects can be extended to the students in different areas and stages.