The Effect Of Prototype-Based Vocabulary Teaching On Junior Students’ Learning Of English Polysemes

Polysemes teaching is an important and difficult aspect of English vocabulary teaching. However, it hasn’t received enough attention for a long time and its teaching effect is far from satisfactory. Recent researches have shown that the prototype theory of cognitive linguistics provides a new idea for polysemes teaching, which is conducive to improving students’ understanding and memorizing of polysemes. However, empirical. studies on polysemes teaching at home about this theory are not large in number, and fewer are found to focus on the subjects in Junior Middle School and lack of the studies on whether the guessing ability of the extended meanings of new words will be affected by learner’s awareness of prototype theory. Hence, it is necessary to apply the prototype theory to English polysemes teaching in Junior Middle School.Based on the prototype theory, together with theories related to metaphor and metonymy, an experimental study is done with an attempt to find out the answers to the following three questions: 1) What are the effects of prototype-based vocabulary teaching on students’ short-term retention of English polysemes? 2) What are the effects of prototype-based vocabulary teaching on students’ long-term retention of English polysemes? 3) What are the effects of prototype-based vocabulary teaching on students’ guessing ability of the extended meanings of new polysemes?The study employs both quantitative and qualitative methods. The quantitative research mainly involves three vocabulary tests. Altogether 127 Grade 2 Junior students from Laian No.3 Middle School are chosen as the subjects, including 64 students in the experiment group (EG) and 63 students in the control group (CG). According to the pre-test, the EG and the CG are found out to have no significant difference in learning polysemes. Then, in the EG, the author adopts prototype-based teaching of polysemes while in the CG, the author teaches the same target words with traditional method. After the teaching activity, the subjects of the two groups attended a short-term retention test, a guessing ability test and a long-term retention test one week later. Then, the data was processed with SPSS and Excel. The qualitative research is a semi-structured interview,6 students of the EG including 2 high achievers,2 medium achievers and 2 low achievers are selected as the interviewees. The whole process of the interview is recorded. Afterwards, the recordings are transcribed into text and the results of the interview are analyzed.The major findings of the study are:1) In the short-term retention test, the EG did much better than the CG and there is a significant difference between the two groups (p=.000). Therefore, prototype-based vocabulary teaching has promoted the students’short-term retention of English polysemes.2) In the long-term retention test, the EG outperformed the CG, and there is a significant difference between the two groups (p=.000). Therefore, prototype-based vocabulary teaching has promoted the students’long-term retention of English polysemes.3) In the guessing test, there is no obvious significance between the two groups (p=.169>.05). That is to say, prototype-based vocabulary teaching is not found out to have significant effect on students’ guessing ability of the meanings of new polysemes. Furthermore, the interview reveals that prototype-based polysemes teaching is helpful to lower the difficulty of students’ polysemes learning, to relieve their memory burden and to motivate their interest on vocabulary learning. However, due to the fact that there is a gap between teacher’s instruction and students’ practical use, some interviewees said they didn’t have a good understanding of prototype theory and the cognitive mechanisms behind meaning extension of words, which is one of the main reasons why prototype-based vocabulary teaching didn’t have significant effective on students’ guessing ability of the meanings of new polysemes.The pedagogical implications of the study are:1) when teaching polysemes, teachers should teach core sense first and then introduce the cognitive mechanisms behind meaning extension. They should guide the students to infer the extended meanings with metaphor and metonymy. 2) Teachers should present the multiple senses of polyseme in different contexts.3) Students should learn to find out the relationships between senses of polyseme by using the prototype theory, metaphor, metonymy and contextual information, etc., rather than learn meanings by rote.Finally, the study still has some limitations, such as the target words are few; some testing words are too abstract; the time of the experiment is shorter; learners’learning style is not taken into account, etc. Therefore, the study needs further improvement.