An Empirical Study Of English Vocabulary Teaching Based On The Basic-Level Category Theory

The great British linguist Wilkins once said:“Without grammar very little can beconveyed but without vocabulary nothing can be conveyed”. A large amount ofresearches and studies have been conducted by linguists and teachers aboutvocabulary teaching. However, most of those researches and studies concentrated onhow to teach vocabulary so that the students can remember as many English wordsas possible. Among which the so called associative memory is the most popular. Thecurrent situation is that Chinese college students indeed have a quite large vocabularysize, but they can not utilize their vocabulary. In other words, most of theirvocabulary is passive not active. Therefore, we should put more emphasis on whatwords to teach as well as how to teach them. This research is going to applyBasic-level category theory to the college English vocabulary teaching, trying toimprove the efficiency of vocabulary teaching. The author, as an English teacher in avocational college, took two classes with the same English level as her researchsubjects. One class (the Controlled Group) received the traditional way of teachingvocabulary, and another class (the Experimental Group) received a new way ofteaching vocabulary, namely, with the application of basic-level category theory. Theexperiment lasted for18weeks. As the results of the post-tests showed that theexperimental group students displayed a better mastery of English vocabulary in thelexical density, lexical variation and lexical quality. From this research, we can havethe following implications that we should apply the basic level category theory to theEnglish vocabulary teaching in colleges.