An Experimental Study On Teaching English Vocabulary With Cultural Meanings In Senior School Based On Frame Semantics

Language is the carrier of its culture.The cultural information is always loaded in some words and expressions of this language,which becomes the barrier of language understanding and use.The new English curriculum standard for senior high school(2003)requires that teachers should help students to develop an awareness in cross-cultural communication in English teaching.According to Fillmore,frame offers the prerequisite for the understanding of vocabulary.Frame is a cognitive structur ing device to present the related frame elements and provide relevant knowledge structures and culture background for vocabulary learning.Vocabulary teaching based on frame semantics may help students to understand the specific use of a word and English c ulture.Therefore,this research aims to explore an effective way of vocabulary teaching guided by frame semantics.Based on the features and taxonomy of the frame,an experiment was carried out to testify whether the students in the Experimental C lass could understand the cultural meaning of English target words and the words previously learnt more accurately in comparison with those in the Control C lass,as well as the possible positive influence that frame knowledge would have on students' vocabulary learning strategies.A cohort of 86 students participated in the study for one semester.They were pretested and chosen from two parallel classes of senior one in a middle school in Guangdong Province,with 43 students in one class as the Experimental C lass and the other class as the Control C lass with the same number of students.They were of the same level on the acquisition of cultural meaning of English vocabulary before the experiment.In the treatment for the Experimental C lass,frame knowledge was applied to the instruction of cultural meaning of English vocabulary and a three-stage model for the teaching was carried out including background knowledge introduction,frame-setting,and consolidation.In contrast,conventional vocabulary teaching was conducted in the Control Class by the same teacher.To testify the effects of the experiment,three research instruments were used including tests,questionnaire and interview.The tests included pre-test and post-test.Both quantitative and qualitative analys is were adopted to double check if they could verify the research hypotheses.Independent and Paired Sample T-tests showed that there existed significant difference between pre-test and post-test,with the main test scores of the Experimental C lass higher than that of the Control C lass and the Sig.(2-tailed)= 0.000,(P<0.05).That meant the students in the Experimental C lass could master the cultural meaning of English words more accurately in comparison with those in the Control C lass.Meanwhile,questionnaires were conducted before and after the experiment to investigate change in students' English vocabulary learning strategies,results of which indicated that before the experiment,students preferred learning vocabulary according to their equivalents in Chinese,but after the experiment,students' awareness of associating vocabulary with the topic of the context or frame has been greatly improved.Most of the students in the interview stated that it was necessary to have the frame knowledge involved during the process of learning cultural meaning of English vocabulary.The findings come to the tentative conclusion that English vocabulary teaching based on frame semantics has a significant effect on the students' English vocabulary learning.It is able to help students not only understand the cultural meaning of English vocabulary more accurately but also improve their English vocabulary learning strategies.The pedagogical implications from this study are thus drawn that English teachers should first help students to activate the frame for the words with cultural meanings.Second,teachers should present the frame knowledge according to the features and types of frame that certain words have.Third,teachers should summarize the cultural meanings of words after a period of teaching and present them in categories.