Chapter One Introduction
1.1The purpose and significance of the study
Vocabulary teaching and learning plays a vital part in foreign language teaching,especially in junior high school English vocabulary teaching. This thesis, based onPrototype Category Theory, lays emphasis on the teaching of basic words, superordinateand subordinate terms of the words, and prototypical meaning of polysemy, which canhave a positive impact on cultivating students’ interests and enhancing their memory ability.Therefore, the aim of this paper is not merely to provide supplementary information forprevious studies to enrich their researches on vocabulary acquisition, but also to helpteachers choose and apply relatively effective methods in English vocabulary teaching,which contribute to arouse their interests and build their confidence in vocabulary learning.As we all know, junior high school education belongs to the nine-year compulsoryeducation, whose teaching aim of English class is to stimulate and cultivate the students’interests in learning and develop their ability of self-study. Although a large number ofresearches were done on college students’ polysemy learning and teaching, the applicationof Prototype Category Theory into junior high school English vocabulary learning andteaching is few. This paper makes an effort to adopt the combination of theoretical andempirical research method to explore a more effective mode of vocabulary teachingconducted by Prototype Category Theory. What is more, it has practical significance bycarrying out teaching experiment to test and prove whether the application of PrototypeCategory Theory will help enrich students’ vocabulary learning strategy and improvestudents’ vocabulary proficiency.
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1.2 The overall structure of the thesis
The thesis is composed of five sections, which are arranged as follows:Chapter One is introduction, the author briefly introduces research background, thepurpose and significance and the overall structure of the study.Chapter Two is the literature review, which includes related researches on PrototypeCategory Theory, vocabulary teaching method and vocabulary learning strategies.Moreover, the application of Prototype Category Theory to vocabulary teaching abroad andat home is also illustrated in this chapter.Chapter Three is research methodology that states the author’s research design in thisstudy. It is composed of the research questions, research participants, research instruments,procedures and data collection.In Chapter Four, it displays the data analysis to analyze the results of the teachingmethod and discusses the findings of the results of the data.In Chapter Five, the conclusion covers major findings, implication, limitation and suggestions for further research based on the empirical study.
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Chapter Two Literature review
What vocabulary is to language learning is what water is to fish. More and moreEnglish teachers and scholars pay much more attention to vocabulary learning and teaching.In this chapter, the author reviews and introduces some related theories, and thedevelopment of English vocabulary teaching. It contains Prototype Category Theory,vocabulary teaching methods and strategies, while the application of the theory tovocabulary teaching is also illustrated.
2.1 Prototype Category Theory
Prototype Category Theory is one of the most fulfilling theories in cognitivelinguistics. The development of cognitive linguistics, to a large extent, owes its discussionto category. Prototype Category Theory is not only the inheritance and development ofClassical Category Theory but the indispensable part of categorization. In addition, theprototype category theory can give a further support to the research on polysemy teachingand learning.When it comes to the Prototype Category Theory, at first, we should distinguishbetween category and categorization. According to Wang (2007), the category comes afterthe categorization. The classification of category, in terms of its esse
