Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background of the Research
Every language in the world is composed of vocabulary which is created ceaselesslyand being acquired by people constantly. Among the three most important ingredients oflanguage learning (sound，grammar and vocabulary), vocabulary takes the fundamentalrole in students' learning as it is called the "building block" of every language. If it werenot for vocabulary, proficiency in listening，speaking, reading and writing would be acastle in the air. Without a solid size of vocabulary, foreign language learn從s cannoteffectively communicate with the English speakers, because they may not be able tobring the corresponding words into their mind, ev^ though they may have mastCTed agreat amount of phonology and grammatical rules. In a word，nobody can deny thecrucial role of vocabulary learning.But the problOTi is，few satisfactory results have been achieved by Chinese Englishteachers and learners, though much time and effort have hem devoted. People fromeducation authority to common people，are puzzled and disturbed by tiie fact thatvocabulary learning is so ineffective. Chinese EFL learners are crazy about manorizingword lists with Chinese equivalents. As we all know, such cases of one lexical formencodes several or even multiple meanings are so common that if students learn themseparately, they are enlarging unnecessary vocabulary size. According to Byrd et al(1987)，out of the approximately 60,000 entries in the Webster's Seventh Dictionary,21,488, or almost 40% of them have two or more senses. Consequently, even they mayhave a powerful memory，they will get nowhere. They probably can do well inrecognizing receptive words but never in producing idiomatical ones.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
As has been pointed out in the previous section, vocabulary remains the biggestobstacle for Chinese EFL learners. In addition, vocabulary learning and teaching lackssystematic theoretical underpinnings. The vast amount of experimental studies andpedagogical publications has demonstrated, beyond all doubt, that the field of vocabularystudies is now anything but a neglected area (Schmitt, 2002). To master a word is tomaster the sum of the word's associations with semantic，syntactic，phonetic, spelling,a>giritive, cultural and individual knowledge. Vocabulary learning requires cognitiveefforts, especially to establish semantic systems with protos^ses. As we know, Englishand Chinese people have two differ印t cognitive systems. So the lexical system of thesecond language being learned will have to be grafted onto the native lexical system forthe development of Chinese college students' lexical prototype and prototypical thinkingwhen they work their way toward the mastery of ttie foreign language lexical system. Thepresent study applies the prototype theory in cognitive linguistics and attempts toinvestigate Chinese college students’ development of lexical prototype and theprototypical teaching principles as well as its constructive force for in-depth vocabularylearning and long-lasting memory in the hope that some light may be shed on teachingEnglish vocabulary to Chinese learners.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Prototype Theory and Prototype Effects in Language
The past roughly three decades has seen the development of cognitive linguistics,which places central importance on the role of meaning, conceptual processes andembodied experience in the study of language and the mind and the way in which theyintersect. Borrowing the concept of prototype from cognitive psychology，cognitivelinguistics aims to study psychological language knowledge of human beings.As an outstanding point of cognitive linguistics, prototype theory has undergone twoperiods of development with origin from Aristotelian classical category theory of ancientGreece. In view of classical Aristotle, categories are containers into which fall the thingsif they have certain properties in common, otherwise they fall outside the container.Features of categories can't be removed or added which means certain object fails tomeet all the conditions, it is judged as a nornnonber; A feature is either involved in thedefinition of a category, or it is not; The boundaries of categories are clear-cut; Allmembers of a category are equal, i.e., there are no degrees of membership in a category.Not until the showing up of an alternative view which is termed as "the theory ofprototypical categories" by Wittgenstein and Rosch, was the former view contradicted(Rosch, 1977).
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12 Applications of Prototype to Lexical Semantics
One immediate and apparent application of prototype theory is in the study ofsranantic equivalence, both within and between languages. Geeraerts examines twosynonymous Dutch verbs vemielen and vermetigen. The two words appear to havereferred to exactly the same range of situations and exhibited identical selectionrestrictions, even in the writings of one and the same author, but they were not perfectsynonyms when the frequencies of different senses were compared; vemielen being usedpredominantly in an abstract sense, while vemietigen referred predominantly to an act ofphysical destruction. (Geeraets, 1990).It is clear that two synonyms may be quite equivalent in some cases, they maynevertheless be associated with distinct prototypes. "Such a state of affairs can occurwith regard to the 'same' word as used by speakers of different varieties of a language. Itis an open question to what extent such differences in the conceptual center mightsometimes hinder communication, or even lead to gross misunderstanding. ” (Tylor,1995).
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Chapter 3 Prototypical Knowledge Representation.......... 15
3.1 Prototypical Knowledge Representation in Students' Mental Lexicon......... 15
3.2 Principles and Patterns of Prototypical Vocabulary Teaching......... 18
3.3 Prototypical Knowledge and Students' Language Abilities .........19
3.4 Summary ......... 19
Chapter 4 The Experiment and Data Collection......... 21
4.1 Research Questions and Objectives......... 21
4.2 Participants......... 22
4.3 Instruments......... 23
4.4 Procedures......... 31
4.5 Data Collection .........36
4.6 Summary .....36
Chapter 5 Research Analysis and Discussion......... 37
5.1 A Result Comparison of Free Elicitation Test (FET).........37
5.2 The Typicality Rating Test Results: Overlaps and Differences......... 39
5.3 The Influence of LI on Vocabulary Knowledge Presentation......... 44
5.4 Results of Synonym Test and VocabiJary Knowledge Scale Test......... 46
5.5 Analysis md Discission of the......... 48
56 Summary .........52
Chapter 5 Research Analysis and Discussion
5.1 A Result Comparison of Free Elicitation Test (FET) and WordAssociation Test
Prototypical way of thinking happens naturally in our daily life. Just as we stated inthe previous part, if you 咖 asked to draw a picture of a bird, or you close your eyes andform a mental image of a bird, what do you visualize? Well, you probably visualize asmall song bird. You would not visualize an ostrich. Because ostriches or penguins arebirds but they are not good examples of birds, they don't fly，they don't sing and they arebig. So a sparrow is representative bird as opposed to ostriches or penguins. This happensdue to the prototype effect in one's mind. And tfiis，of course，applies not just to tilingslike birds but it also applies to tilings in language itself.In order to identify the prototypical use of each word in students' mind and mostimportantly to investigate the typical scene recalled by the vebs after analyze whatcomes before and after the words, present teaching experiment takes free elicitation testas the instrument, requiring our subjects to write down the most typical sentences usingthe following six words.
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Conclusion
There is almost no sign showing the existence of prototypical thinking in students'vocabulary learning habits. The following factors may well illustrate why ova: studentshave not formed and developed prototypical thinking:a. Previous lexical system. In learning an English word，most Chinese EFL learnersjust pay attention to its Chinese memiings (24%). Prototypical semantic network andnon-linguistic knowledge are left unnoticed. For the Chinese EFL learners, they haveestablished Chinese lexical concept behind an English word. Therefore, it is natural thatwhat is stored in their mind is just the word form and Chinese word meaning, while otheraspects of word knowledge are almost absent.b. Lack of native language environment. Knowledge of word forms，word meaningsand word uses is built from frequent experience with different kinds of usage events. Inorder to get prototypical vocabulary knowledge, Chinese EFL learners should beprovided with native language environment and sufficient contextualized input,othCTwise, knowledge of word forms, word meanings and word uses stored in theirmental lexicon would be rather limited. In addition, Chinese English teachers don't payenou迪 attention to prototype theory.
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Reference (omitted)