An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Polysemy Teaching In Primary School Driven By Linguistic Cognitive Motivation

A polysemy is a word with different,but related senses.The polysemous words are learned in two traditional ways in primary school now.The first is the scattered and mechanical recite way,which leads to a large memory burden and unsatisfactory learning results.In the second way,polysemy has only one highly generalized meaning,and the others are extended in context.In this method,each word needs to be learned in the specific context,greatly reducing the efficiency of learning.In recent years,teaching polysemous driven by linguistic cognitive motivation has achieved certain pleasing results.At present,this kind of research is limited to middle school and college learners.Few researchers have adopted cognitive motivation to polysemous word teaching in primary school though these early learners face the difficulties of learning polysemous words as well.This study attempts to explore the effect of teaching polysemy based on cognitive motivation at primary school.According to the characteristics of primary school students,the method adopted is intuitive and specific cognitive language motivation method.The specific research questions include:(1)Is cognitive motivation based vocabulary teaching more effective to help primary school students with their memory of polysemy meanings?(2)Is cognitive motivation based vocabulary teaching better improve primary school students' ability to speculate on the meaning of polysemous words in a new context?The author chooses eighty-four Grade Four students from Nanan Primary school of Guangzhou as the participants.They are divided into the experimental class and control class.At the beginning of the experiment,pretest were handed out to test students' polysemous proficiency and differences between the two classes.The cognitive motivation was utilized to teach polysemous words in the experimental class(N=42)while polysemous words were taught employing the conventional teaching way in the control class(N=42).The experiment lasts for 16 weeks.A post test is administered after the experiment.All the results are analyzed by SPSS 17.0.The following findings are achieved: Firstly,the application of cognitive motivation based method can help primary school students promote the memory of polysemy meanings.Secondly,the application of cognitive motivation based method can better improve the ability of primary school students to infer the meaning of polysemous words in a new context than the students in control class.Therefore,polysemy teaching based on cognitive motivation in primary school really produced positive result.