An Empirical Study On Vocational College Students' Acquisition Of English Modals

Modality, an important category in the linguistics, expresses the speakers' opinions and attitudes towards their sayings. And the English modals, a complicated language phenomenon, are the main carrier of modality. With the different contexts, an English modal has several different modal meanings and with the same context, the same modal meaning may be expressed by several English modals, which causes some difficulties for the students in EFL (English as a Foreign Language) environment to learn English modals. Many scholars at home and abroad conduct intensive studies from different perspectives, and have achieved better research results. The limitations of these studies are as follows:firstly, the majority of these studies theoretically study the English modals. Then, there are less empirical studies about the application of the cognitive theories into the teaching of second language acquisition. Lastly, there is no empirical study to prove whether the cognitive theories can improve the effect of English modals in a long term.In addition, previously, the traditional teaching method is used for the learning of English modals. The teacher just simply lists all the meanings of the modal verbs, and the students mechanically memorize these meanings. Compared with the traditional grammar teaching method, cognitive linguistics primarily studies the language, taking the rules and the process of human's cognitive acknowledgment as a starting point. Therefore, regarding the image schema theory and mental space theory as the theoretical basis, the vocational college students as the participants, the author connects teaching and acquisition to teach and test the students' acquisition of English modals. The paper is not only to explore the cognitive theories' positive effect on the students' acquisition of English modals, and on the short-term memory and the long-term memory of the acquisition of English modals. Meanwhile, the aim of the paper is to promote the students authentically and comprehensively to master the meanings and functions of the English modals through the learning of the cognitive theories. In the end, some suggestions are proposed for the teaching of English modals.In the experiment, the method is the paper test, and the experimental subjects are 95 non-English major sophomores from two parallel classes in a vocational college in Xi'an,49 of whom are in the experimental class and 46 of whom are in the control class. The former learn the English modals under the guidance of the image schema theory and mental space theory, whereas, the latter learn the English modals through the traditional teaching method. The whole experiment lasts for 16 weeks during which there are three testes:the pretests, the immediate post-tests and the delayed post-tests. Having finished the experiment, the author collected all the data, made an analysis of these data with the help of SPSS 18.0, and drew a conclusion as follows:(1) the effect of the acquisition English modals under the guidance of cognitive theories is better than that of the traditional grammar teaching method; (2) making a contrast with the effect the traditional teaching method, the teaching method in the light of cognitive theories not only promotes the acquisition of English modals in the short term, but improves the acquisition in the long term; (3) there is the significant difference between the short-term acquisition and the long-term acquisition in the experimental class under the instructions of the cognitive theories.