The Application Of Categorization Theory To English Vocabulary Teaching In Rural Senior High Schools

The General Senior High School English Curriculum Standard(2017)has lowered the requirement of the number of core vocabulary in the college entrance examination but imposed increasingly higher standards for students’ vocabulary knowledge and abilities.And the rural school vocabulary teaching has long adopted traditional teaching methods,mainly through reading,reciting,dictation vocabulary to learn vocabulary.This teaching method makes vocabulary learning boring and is not conducive to improving the efficiency of English vocabulary learning.Obviously,it cannot meet the new curriculum standards for English vocabulary teaching requirements.From the cognitive mechanism of human beings,cognitive linguistics puts the cognition and memory of vocabulary in the objective world and into the cognitive language structure,so as to help learners accurately analyze and understand the internal connection of language.As an important part of cognitive linguistics,categorization theory plays an important guiding role in vocabulary teaching.Among them,the category emphasizes that vocabulary teaching should be in line with people’s cognition,and the categorization of vocabulary should be carried out to improve the memory effect.Prototype category view holds that vocabulary teaching should start from the prototypical meaning of a word and radiate its extension meanings,which stimulates people’s metaphorical cognitive thinking mode to expand other meanings,thus establishing the word meaning network.The basic level category of vocabulary teaching lays emphasis on deep learning of the core vocabulary and key vocabulary.The purpose of this study is to explore the following questions:(1)can the application of categorization theory in English vocabulary teaching improve students’ cognitive levels and abilities of English vocabulary?(2)are students’ English comprehensive scores positively correlated with their English vocabulary scores? Based on these two questions,the author selected two classes(the experimental class and the controlled class)in the first year of senior high school in Nan’an city as experimental objects for a semester of comparative teaching.The controlled class still adopted the traditional vocabulary teaching method,while the experimental class adopted the vocabulary teaching method guided by categorization theory.At the beginning of the term and the end of the experiment,English vocabulary tests and comprehensive English ability tests were conducted.The purpose is to test students’ English vocabulary levels and comprehensive English levels.Furthermore,it is proved whether there is a positive correlation between comprehensive English levels and English vocabulary levels.This study proves the feasibility and effectiveness of applying the categorization theory to English vocabulary teaching in rural senior high schools,which provides new ideas for English teachers in rural senior high schools to carry out vocabulary teaching,and also has certain reference values for English vocabulary teaching in rural senior high schools.