A Cognitive Study Of Chinese Junior Students’ Acquisition Of English Nouns

Chinese students’ English learning is carried out in the classrooms and their cognition of English words is conducted through learning rather than acquiring in natural language. In addition, Chinese students start learning English vocabularies from nouns, for the reason that nouns are considered as content words and the indispensable part of a sentence. Concepts of nouns are closely related to human’s cognition of the world and the nouns account for a significant part of language system. English nouns vary from the Chinese ones in form,sound, meaning and number, which cause many difficulties to the Chinese junior students.Therefore, this thesis aims to find out what difficulties the junior students encounter in acquiring English nouns by adopting the action research in the junior English teaching practice.The study adopts an action research and selects 28 grade two junior students of basic level from a training center as the research subjects. Three types of tests are carried out to investigate junior students’ difficulties in acquiring fifteen target English nouns chosen from the first three units of the grade two’s English course book. After the experiment, the author analyzes the data and classifies three types of difficulties which are often encountered by junior students. Based on the findings and under the instruction of the prototype theory and information processing model, the writer tries to explain how English nouns are acquired and propose three cognitive learning strategies to facilitate junior students’ acquisition of English nouns, including syllabic and morphological parsing, audio-visual parallel input and prototypical association.This thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter one briefly introduces the research background, the research methodologies and the structure of the thesis. In Chapter two, a review of the previous studies on English vocabulary nouns acquisition, cognitive learning strategies and Chinese junior students’ English noun acquisition is made. Followed in Chapter three is an illustration of the theoretical framework of this thesis, which embodies the prototype theory and Information Processing Model. Chapter four is an empirical study on Chinese students’ acquisition of English nouns by adopting the action research and quantitative analysis approaches, exploring Chinese junior students’ difficulties in acquiring English nouns and discussing the causes and solutions for these difficulties. In Chapter five,the writer puts forward some cognitive learning strategies for Chinese junior students in the acquisition of English nouns. The last chapter serves as a conclusion to the findings,limitations of the research and makes recommendations for future study.