An Application Of Prototype Theory To The Teaching Of English Polysemous Words In Senior High School

Vocabulary is the foundation of English learning,which plays a vital role in English learning.To a large extent,vocabulary size determines learners' proficiency of English language.The curriculum standard for high school also makes the requirement that students should master certain amount of vocabulary.As an aspect of vocabulary,polysemous words can enrich students' vocabulary knowledge and improve their communicative competence.However,many students pay little attention to polysemous words and they do not have any other effective methods except memorizing mechanically.For traditional method,teachers just teach the commonly-used meanings to students without explaining the relationship among those meanings,which results in inefficiency of students' polyseme learning.Therefore,it has been urgent for teachers to help students master the strategy of polyseme learning and memorize polysemous words efficiently.With the development of cognitive linguistics,prototype theory is regarded as a new perspective of polysemous words learning,which attracts broad attention in academic circle.Many scholars give the evidence that prototype theory has a positive effect on polyseme teaching.After summarizing the researches at home and abroad on prototype theory and vocabulary teaching based on prototype theory,an empirical research is conducted by applying prototype theory to the teaching of English polysemous words in high school.Specific research procedures are designed for the experiment based on prototype theory.Prototype theory is regarded as a new method and applied to teaching experiment,which help students memorize meanings of polysemous words and lead students to find relationships among these meanings,so as to examine whether the prototype theory can improve students' level and efficiency of polyseme learning.To achieve the purpose,an experiment,which lasts one semester,is conducted with 113 senior-one students from two classes of Lanzhou No.2 High School as the research subjects.Two classes are randomly divided into experimental class and controlled class.There are 57 students in the experimental class and 56 students in the controlled class.In experimental class the method based on prototype theory is used while traditional teaching method is still used in the controlled class.That is,in the experimental class the teacher starts from the prototype meaning and takes advantage of metaphor and metonymy to extend to derived meanings step by step,and during the teaching procedure,students are guided to find the relationship among meanings,while in controlled class the main procedure is to teach polysemous words through example sentences or copying them repeatedly without explaining the relationship among meanings.The research instrument includes questionnaire,interview,general vocabulary test,pre-test and post-test of polysemous words.In addition,SPSS 17.0 is used as a statistics tool to analyze the data collected from pre-test and post-test.The result of the experiment shows that,for the experimental class,there is significant difference between the score of post-test and pre-test,while for the controlled class,there is no significant difference between the score of post-test and pre-test.Therefore,some conclusions can be drawn as follows: Firstly,the teaching of polysemous words based on prototype theory can help students memorize polysemous words and enhance their efficiency in polyseme learning.Secondly,prototype theory can provide a new method for polyseme learning,which help students find relationships among meanings,categorize these meanings specifically.The semantic network can be formed in students' mind so as to they can find an effective method to learn polysemous words.Thirdly,different from the traditional method,the method based on prototype theory can encourage students to think positively,participate in teaching activities actively and can motivate students' interest and imagination.This experiment also brings some implications to the teaching of polysemous words.Firstly,teachers should lead students to regard prototype meaning as the foundation.They should help students take use of metaphor and metonymy to find the correlation among meanings,so as to form the semantic network systematically.Secondly,teachers should take students' individual difference into consideration.They should design proper and acceptable teaching activities based on students' age,which can attract students' interest and enrich their imagination.Thus,prototype theory can be applied to polyseme teaching practice and achieve the students-centered teaching philosophy.Thirdly,teachers should constantly enrich the knowledge of linguistics theory and teaching methodology.They should also summarize their teaching method continually and find effective teaching strategies to enhance their professional proficiency.Frankly,although the research has certain innovation and academic value,there still exist many flaws and shortcomings which will be solved hopefully in the follow-up study.