An Empirical Study On English Vocabulary Teaching In Senior High School From The Perspective Of Iconicity

Vocabulary learning is the foundation of mastering a language and has always been an integral part of high school English teaching.Traditional vocabulary teaching does not enable students to effectively remember vocabulary and understand lexical rules.Students lack interest in vocabulary teaching.Iconicity puts primary emphasis on the interpretability,motivation and non-arbitrarinss between the signifier and the signified and attaches importance to the integration of the inner mechanism and outer factor of language,which helps to reveal the relation between language and cognition.This study expounds the iconicity theory and its application to senior high school vocabulary teaching to investigate the following two research questions:1.What are the effects of iconicity on senior high school students' English vocabulary proficiency?2.What are the changes of the students' attitudes towards vocabulary teaching from the pers pective of iconicity?In order to uncover the two research questions,92 students from two parallel classes in a high school in Shenyang were selected as research subjects in this study.Iconicity approach was employed in the experimental class,while traditional vocabulary teaching method was adopted in the control class.The experiment lasted for three months.Pre-test,post-test,questionnaire and interview were employed as the research instruments to explore the effects of iconicity in high school vocabulary teaching and attitude change in English vocabulary teaching.The researcher collected the experimental data and analyzed them using SPSS 17.0 software.The research findings show that students in experimental class have made a lot progress and their attitude towards vocabulary teaching has become more positive after the experiment.Some pedagogical implications have been proposed.Firstly,more specific theoretical explanations of iconicity can be applied into the language teaching and learning domains.Secondly,all levels students can be participants to further verify the effects of iconicity.Finally,more devotion of time and energy are needed to obtain more precise empirical findings.