A Cognitive Study Of Vocabulary

Vocabulary teaching has always been an important component of foreign language teaching and learning, while polysemy constitutes one of the most difficult aspects of vocabulary teaching. For a long time, a great many of teachers and students have been tormented by the problem of polysemy. Up to now, they still have not found any effective way to deal with it. Consequently, it has had negative effects on foreign language teaching and learning. According to cognitive linguists, metaphor is the reference of words'meanings, and most of the polysemies are motivated by metaphor. As a cognitive mechanism, metaphor plays a vital role in meaning extension. Since metaphor shares a close relationship with polysemy, if we could apply metaphor theory to polysemy teaching, the teaching and learning of it would become easier. As a result, it may not be considered as a headache for teachers and students in vocabulary teaching and learning.The attempt to connect metaphor study with foreign language teaching was a novel approach. It began with the western linguists Cameron and Low in 1999. At the first national seminar on cognitive linguistics in Beijing in 2002, the Chinese scholar Lin Shuwu listed the study of the relation between metaphor and language teaching as one of the seven themes of metaphor study. From then on, more and more attention has been paid to the study of metaphor and language teaching in China.It is necessary for foreign language teaching to enrich itself by adopting the theories of metaphor, and it is also a trend that theories of metaphor are applied to the field of foreign language teaching and learning. In recent years, more than 30 academic papers on metaphor and language teaching and learning have been published in different kinds of journals. They mainly focus on the following four fields: 1) the cultivation of metaphorical competence in English teaching; 2) the application of metaphor awareness in English teaching; 3) metaphor and culture teaching; 4) metaphor and vocabulary teaching. In addition, there are 7 M.A. theses that examine metaphor and vocabulary teaching. All of these studies explore the relationship between metaphor and vocabulary teaching in a micro sense, without specifically focusing on any concrete problem in vocabulary teaching. As for polysemy, there is little discussion.As it is widely recognized, polysemy constitutes one of the most difficult aspects in vocabulary teaching and it has a close relationship with metaphor. If we could apply the theories of metaphor to vocabulary teaching, the problem of polysemy would be solved to some extent. Motivated by this idea, the author designed this study with the hope of exploring the feasibility of applying metaphor to polysemy teaching.This thesis chose two intact parallel classes from the College of Foreign Studies, Guangxi Normal University to carry out a comparative empirical study. To ensure that there no significant pre-experimental differences exist between the two classes, a pretest was designed for them before the experiment began. Then, a two months'comparative teaching experiment was conducted in order to find out whether different polysemy teaching approaches would lead to different vocabulary retention. In the experiment, 64 polysemies under 8 semantic fields were presented to the two classes through different approaches. Approach I, teaching polysemies with explicit presentation of conceptual metaphors and explanation of the mappings between the metaphor source domain and the target domain was adopted for the experimental class; Approach II, teaching polysemies without explicit presentation of conceptual metaphors and explanation of the mappings between the metaphor source domain and the target domain was adopted for the control class.The experiment lasted for 8 weeks, one week for each semantic field of polysemies. When all the polysemies were finished, the subjects of the two classes were given two post-tests. All the data collected in the pre-test and the post-tests were run by the statistical software—SPSS 11.5 so as to present some objective statistical evidences for the quantitative analysis. In addition, a qualitative analysis was also conducted to find out students'opinions on the two teaching approaches.According to the empirical study and its data analysis, this thesis comes to the following conclusions:1) It is feasible to apply metaphor to polysemy teaching and to cultivate metaphorical competence into the students;2) Metaphor can facilitate the understanding and retention of vocabulary. After receiving metaphor training, students from the experiment class performed better in the understanding and retention of polysemy than students from the control class who did not have any training on metaphor theory.3) Applying metaphor to polysemy teaching can greatly arouse students'interest in vocabulary learning.There are six chapters in this thesis. Chapter One is the introduction. Chapter Two is the literature review, which provides the background for the present study by reviewing the main studies in some relevant fields. Chapter Three, the part of theoretical framework, focuses on some main concepts related to this study. Chapter Four is the research design and procedures, which disscusses how the hypothesis is put forward and how the comparative teaching experiment is carried out. Chapter Five presents the data of the research and disscussion on the results. Chapter Six is the conclusion, which discusses the major findings of this study, points out the limitations of it and suggests some areas for further studies.