An Empirical Study On The Application Of Prototype Category Theory To College English Polysemy Teaching

Vocabulary teaching plays an important role in the foreign language teaching and polysemy is always a difficult part in vocabulary teaching.In order to improve students' vocabulary amount and competence,teachers put their heart and soul into the vocabulary teaching,but the reality is that students may still have problems in reading and understanding an English article or text in a certain context;even they know the meanings of the words.The reason is the words have two or more than two meanings,which we mean the polysemy.Polysemy learning plays a very significant role in the linguistic study.Insisting every meaning of the polysemy as isolated and ignoring the associations between the external and internal structures,the linguists overemphasize the significance of external structure of language,due to the influence of the traditional linguistics.This can not give a comprehensive understanding on the polysemy.This thesis mainly applies the prototype category theory to college English polysemous words teaching,in order to identify the significance and the effectiveness of prototype category theory in college English polysemous words teaching.The objective of the thesis is to prove the preponderant significance of the prototypical meaning in extending other meanings,and also identify the importance of the cognitive devices of metaphor and metonymy in extending the meanings of polysemous words.This thesis uses the empirical method.All together 130 students from the accounting major of Xi'an Eurasian University are selected to take part in the empirical study.They are distributed into control class and experimental class.From the pre-questionnaire,we know all of the participants who have no knowledge about the prototype category theory.From the pre-test,we know all of the participants are in the same level on the learning of the polysemy.The prototype category theory with the two devices:metaphor and metonymy is applied in teaching polysemous words in the experimental class;traditional teaching methods are used in the control class.The two parallel classes are made a comparison to see the differences after sixteen weeks' teaching experiment.SPSS 19.0 is used to analyze all of the statistics.The results of the empirical study are:the application of prototype category theory can make students from the experimental class have more interest than the students from the control class;the application of prototype category theory can make students from the experimental class get higher scores than the students from the control class.