A Study Of The Application Of The Teaching Method Based On Prototype Category Theory In Senior High School English Polysemy Teaching

As a universal phenomenon of human language,polysemy plays an important role in vocabulary teaching.Polysemy is quite essential for senior high school students whether in reading comprehension or cloze filling in College Entrance Exam.However,in the practical English polysemy teaching in senior high school in China,teachers usually only pay attention to the common meanings and ignore the other meanings.Teachers simply introduce the meaning of a word in a specific context to students,while ignoring the deep relationship between the meanings.With the development of cognitive linguistics,the Prototype Category Theory has been widely used in various research on English polysemy teaching.However,relevant research is still in the stage of development and improvement,and there are still some shortcomings in the combination of theory and practical teaching methods.Based on the above deficiencies in theory and teaching practice,this paper,starting from the teaching method based on the Prototype Category Theory,emphasizes the connection between the prototypical meaning and the peripheral meaning in polysemy,that is,the cognitive means of metaphor and metonymy are used to extend the semantic meaning according to the prototypical meaning of words and draw semantic network diagrams.The following research questions are raised:(1)What is the current situation of high school students’ English polysemy learning?(2)What are the effects of the teaching method based on Prototype Category Theory on students’ polysemy acquisition?In this paper,85 students from two ordinary classes in senior 1 of a middle school in Urumqi were selected and carried out a teaching experiment for four months.Before the experiment,the current situation of students’ polysemy learning was investigated by pre-questionnaire and pre-test.In the experiment,the experimental class adopted the teaching method based on Prototype Category Theory for polysemy teaching,while the control class still adopted the traditional teaching method for polysemy teaching.After the experiment,a post-test was conducted for the experimental class and the controlled class,and a post-questionnaire and an interview were conducted for the experimental class.Excel 2016 and SPSS 26.0 were used to analyze the experimental data.According to the data analysis results,the following conclusions were drawn:(1)most senior high school students hold a negative attitude toward polysemy learning.They are confused about polysemy in reading comprehension and cloze filling.Most senior high school students learn polysemy by rote memorization or contextual guessing,without forming a systematic polysemy learning strategy.(2)The teaching method of English polysemy based on Prototype Category Theory has positive effects on students’ polysemy acquisition in the aspects of their attitudes,confusion,learning strategies,memory level,and autonomous analysis ability.The research results show that the application of the teaching method based on the Prototype Category Theory in high school English polysemy teaching can effectively promote students’ polysemy acquisition and provide some enlightenment and help for future vocabulary teaching.