A Probe Into Middle School English Vocabulary Teaching From A Cognitive Perspective

As we enter the 21st century, acquisition of vocabulary has assumed a more important role in learning a second language. The teacher is faced with the challenge of how to help students store words in English language. So how to teach vocabulary efficiently is what we want to solve in this thesis.To solve this problem, first we review the history of English vocabulary teaching, mainly including Grammar Translation Method, Direct Method, Audio-lingual Method and Communicative Language Teaching. Also, we have discussed the advantages and the disadvantages of current main vocabulary teaching methods. And we point out that we are going to teach English vocabulary based on the theories of cognitive linguistics.Second, we interpret cognitive linguistic theories. Cognitive linguistics is an approach to language that is based on our experience of the world and the way we perceive and conceptualize it. In order to study vocabulary instruction we have mainly interpreted prototype category theory, conceptual structure theory and iconicity. Prototype is the cognitive reference point of people categorizing the world and it is the best and most typical member of categorizing things. Philosophers and cognitive linguists have shown that metaphors and metonymies are powerful cognitive tools for our conceptualization of abstract categories. Iconicity refers to a natural relation between the signifier and the signified of language form. This kind of relation is not arbitrary but motivated. It has a great value in our understanding of the nature of language symbol and in revealing the relation between language and cognition. Based on the cognitive linguistic theories, we have cited some...