A Study On Application Of Middle School English Vocabulary Teaching Based On Category Theory

As the basic part of English teaching, vocabulary teaching has been put a high premium by teachers. Vocabulary is one of the important standards to measure one’s English level, and its significance is incomparable. But there is a tendency of English vocabulary teaching that the pronunciation, meaning and fixed collocation of words are taught in isolation for a long time, causing students to take notes or memorize word list mechanically. The phenomenon of time consuming and inefficient vocabulary teaching and learning is widespread. So it is a challenge for teachers to help students to acquire and master enough vocabulary and use them properly. On this account, the paper makes a research about senior high school English vocabulary teaching and learning and puts forward detailed arrangements based on the category theory from the perspective of cognitive linguistics.First of all, the author expounds the development process of category theory based on the literature. Then an investigation on the present situation of English vocabulary teaching and learning in senior high school is made and some strategies for English vocabulary teaching under the guidance of the theory are put forward. Finally, the paper designs and carries out the vocabulary teaching experiment based on category theory. In this experiment we treat the two classes in the first grade in No.2 Middle School of Nanzhao county as subjects, and adopt the methods of pre-test, post-test and interview to collect then collate and analyze data. The experiment verifies vocabulary teaching under the guidance of category theory can not only arouse students’ enthusiasm and their interests in vocabulary learning but also expand students’ vocabulary and improve their vocabulary even language level.Category theory reveals the cognitive mechanism of vocabulary expansion and extension on the basis of prototypical words and basic category vocabulary, making us realize the relationship among vocabulary and meanings of words. If we apply the theory into vocabulary teaching practice, value basic category words’ deep processing, strengthen the teaching of polysemy based on prototypical meaning and adhere to the semantic aggregation and segregation strategy to improve the ability of vocabulary expansion, students can use the most economical way to learn vocabulary in association. As a result, a valid way contributing to vocabulary teaching can be explored, which counts a great deal to improve the quality of English teaching.