A Study Of English Polysemous Verbs Teaching Based On Prototype Theory In The Senior High School

The verb plays an essential role in English sentences,which is regarded as the soul of a sentence.Because of the various and flexible use of verbs,verb learning has become a difficult problem for English learners.Especially for senior high school students,the size of English vocabulary in the outline of the college entrance examination is 3500,of which verbs takes up 17%.Additionally,most verbs are polysemous,which increases the load of vocabulary learning.For English teachers implicitly use traditional ways to teach polysemous verbs,which doesn't reduce students' learning pressure,students do not well in learning and mastering polysemous verbs.Therefore,it's necessary to find an effective method to guide polysemous verbs teaching.So far,researches about English vocabulary polysemy teaching and learning mostly are in college,and few of these pay attention to senior high school.So,this thesis is an empirical research about polysemous verbs teaching based on prototype theory in senior high school.The subjects in this experiment are the students who are from two classes in Grade 1 in the high school attached to Hunan Normal University.Class Three is the experimental class,and Class One is the control class.There are 60 students in each class.The experiment consists of five procedures:questionnaire,pre-test,teaching procedures,and post-test and interview.The research questions are the following:(1)How effective is polysemous verb teaching based on prototype theory in senior high school?(2)To what extent does polysemous verb teaching based on prototype theory help students use polysemous verbs?In this research,EXCEL and independent sample T test of SPSS 19.0 are used to analysis the data from the experiment.The date indicates in the following:(1)In the pre-test,there is no significant difference between the experimental class and the control class on the common English polysemous verbs acquisition(sig=0.809<0.05),which can ensure that the following experiment is valid.(2)The result of post-test shows that the average score of the experimental class is far higher than that of the control class,which reflects a great difference between the two classes(sig=0.000<0.05).And the students in EC have good performance in the prototypical meanings of polysemous verbs.And they can also master peripheral meanings better than the students in CC.Therefore,the results of the experiments suggest that compared with traditional vocabulary teaching methods,English polysemous verbs teaching based on prototype theory is more effective and it can help student understand and use polysemous verbs.The results of the research have the guiding function to English vocabulary teaching,especially to polysemous vocabulary in senior high school.