Research On English Vocabulary Acquisition By Iconicity In Senior High School

Vocabulary is one of the elements in a language.To learn a language,in most cases,the first step is to master the vocabulary of the language.Students' ability of listening,speaking,reading and writing is directly influenced by their vocabulary.At the same time,vocabulary teaching is also an important part of English teaching.For most Chinese students,senior high school is an extremely important learning period and is also a basic stage before entering university.However,many of them are overwhelmed by the sudden increase in English vocabulary after entering senior high school.Therefore,vocabulary is the main obstacle for them to learn English.For these reasons,this thesis applies the iconicity theory to the teaching and learning of English vocabulary in senior high school with two purposes:first,to test whether the theory has a significant impact on vocabulary acquisition.If so,which level of students has the most significant impact;second,to explore an effective approach to vocabulary acquisition and further develop this theory.This research adopts the method of qualitative and quantitative analysis.The research instruments are a questionnaire,interviews,lectures and observation as well as tests.The participants were 97 students and 6 English teachers from two key classes of senior two in Haikou No.4 Senior High School.The two classes were randomly selected as either control class or experimental class.The experimental class was taught with the iconicity theory,while the control class was taught with the traditional teaching method,that is,students learned words mainly by rote.In addition,students in the experimental class were divided into three level groups,namely low level,medium level and high level.After the experiment,SPSS 24.0 was employed to analyze the collected data.By comparing the data of the experimental class and the control class,it is found that the experimental class achieved remarkable results in vocabulary acquisition with the help of iconicity.In addition,students of the three level groups in the experimental class showed varying degrees of progress,and the students in the low-level group made the most significant progress.Meanwhile,the results of lecture observation showed that students changed their attitudes towards learning English vocabulary and improved their efficiency in memorizing words to some extent through the application of iconicity vocabulary acquisition method.This study has some implications for English vocabulary teaching and learning in senior high school.For teachers,iconicity vocabulary teaching can make up for the deficiency of English vocabulary teaching in a way,but it requires teachers to be familiar with various theories of lexical iconicity and be able to apply these theories to their practical vocabulary teaching.For senior high school students,to learn a new word,they cannot just acquire words by rote but need to fully understand the relationship between word forms and meanings.Finally,English,as a language,needs teachers and students to use in their daily life so as to improve the overall proficiency of English.