A Study Of Frame-based IT English Vocabulary Teaching

As the smallest communication unit, vocabulary plays a crucial part in language acquisition. According to Meara, P.’s study (1992), most of the language learners take the acquisition of vocabulary as their greatest single sources of problems. Nowadays, English is still the most widely used language worldwide. In China, most of the English language learners develop vocabulary from school classes. On the one hand, students think it is boring to learn vocabulary and always complain that the teachers’ explanations of words are too dull to memorize. On the other hand, teachers also feel annoyed on such issue. They often feel frustrated and disappointed on the result and always try to find out an effective way to teach vocabulary. For the purpose at hand, vocabulary is attached more and more importance as the centre of learning and teaching.People have carried out quite a lot of researches on vocabulary teaching under the guidance of different kinds of theories. And the researches on this subject keep moving on because of their sustained effort. Author of this thesis also attempt to find out a practical vocabulary teaching method with the guidance of new linguistics approach. Further more, to improve students’vocabulary accuracy as well as reading skills.Appealing to the Education Ministry’s requirement on college English, the author chooses IT English course, which firmly integrates the English language knowledge with the professional skills, to carry out the research to test the practical value of cognitive linguistics’frame theory. After discussing the features and impacts of previous vocabulary teaching instructed by different linguistic theories, the researcher analyzes the two stages of vocabulary learning and puts forward that IT English vocabulary teaching should focus on the first stage since it is more teachable, and the key points of teaching are to raise students’frame awareness and encourage them to learn by experience.The words of IT English have distinctive characteristics. IT material is mainly objective. And IT English vocabulary can be classified into three categories:general words, semi-terminologies and terminologies. Taking those characteristics in mind, the author introduces how to design the vocabulary teaching with the guidance of frame theory. It has shown how to transfer the frame knowledge automatically to students by diagrams as well as some effective exercises. Chapter five is about the data collection and analysis. Based on the result of Mean Test of the pretest and the Independent Samples Test of the posttest, the researcher probes the feasibility of frame approach on vocabulary teaching from different perspectives and reaches the conclusion that vocabulary teaching under the guidance of cognitive linguistics’ frame theory can improve students’ IT vocabulary accuracy as well as IT reading ability.