| Based on the conceptual metaphor theory,the current study is conducted to explore the effect of cognitive teaching method on the acquisition of polysemous words by means of the psychological software E-prime.Polysemous adjectives and polysemous verbs are mainly selected as the experimental materials.60 freshmen and 60 juniors are chosen as the subjects in our experiments.Each level group is randomly divided into experimental group and control group.The control subjects receive the traditional teaching method,while subjects in the experimental group are instructed by the conceptual metaphor-based polysemy teaching method.Results show that 1)in experiment one,according to the two-way between-subjects ANOVA analysis of students’ accuracy,the main effect of grade is significant(F（1,96）=6.91,p<0.05)in the immediate post-test;it shows that under the same teaching method,the juniors perform better than the freshmen.The main effect of teaching method is also significant(F（1,96）=5.35,p<0.05),revealing that the traditional polysemy teaching method is worse than the conceptual metaphor-based polysemy teaching method;In the delayed post-test,it manifests that there is a statistically significant difference(F（1,96）=7.33,p<0.05)in grade.It shows that under the same teaching method,students’ average accuracy will be affected by their English proficiency.Significant difference is shown in the teaching method(F（1,96）=13.50,p<0.05).It indicates that the cognitive teaching method is better than the traditional polysemy teaching method on the retention of the polysemous adjectives;2)in the experiment two,according to two-way between-subjects ANOVA analysis of students’ accuracy,the main effect of grade is significant(F（1,96）=7.59,p<0.05)and the main effect of teaching method is significant(F（1,96）=4.59,p<0.05)in the immediate post-test,too;it indicates that under the same teaching method,students’ average accuracy will be affected by their English proficiency;and the cognitive teaching method is better than the traditional polysemy teaching method on the understanding of the polysemous verbs.In the delayed post-test,grade shows a significant difference(F（1,96）=5.99,p<0.05).At the same time,teaching method also has a significant difference(F（1,96）=12.79,p<0.05).It indicates that under the same teaching method,the juniors perform better than the freshmen;the cognitive teaching method is better than the traditional polysemy teaching method on the retention of the polysemous verbs;3)in experiment one and experiment two,there is no significant difference（p>0.05）between the immediate post-test and delayed post-test in the experimental group,irrespective of the English levels.while in the control group the difference between the immediate post-test and the delayed post-test is significant（p<0.05）.In conclusion,compared with traditional polysemy teaching method,the conceptual metaphor-based polysemy instruction has a positive effect on the the understanding and retention of English polysemous adjectives and verbs both in the short-term and long-term memory.Besides,the conceptual metaphor-based polysemy teaching method is good for junior students in their understanding and retention of target words,and it is beneficial to freshman students as well.As far as the contribution to field of vocabulary acquisition is concerned,this study attempts to explore the effective ways to teach polysemous words,to equip English teachers with feasible ways to teach polysemous words more efficiently,and thereby to improve the learners’ ability to comprehend the English polysemous words. |
