Chapter 1 Introduction
1.1 Background of Present Study
Iconicity has been neglected in the early days when the arbitrariness, which isput forward by Saussure, still pervades the linguistic study. With the popularization ofcognition in 1960s, iconicity theory is then considered as significant in linguistics. Itis recognized that, at present, the study of a theory should not only be confined to thetheoretical level but be developed into some cross inter-discipline evenmulti-discipline research. The application of iconicity theory to the practice tends tobe necessary as well as significant.In China, English teaching always meets with various obstacles, withvocabulary teaching being one of the biggest. Narrowing it down to a morespecialized field, the teaching of Medical English vocabularies is full of problems inthe previous teaching activities. What should be noticed is that the teaching ofmedical vocabularies hasn’t yet found a comprehensive way to be utilized and theweakness of medical vocabulary learning may result in problems in other aspects of English learning, for instance, listening, speaking, reading and writing. As the basis oflanguage learning, vocabulary learning turns out to be the most difficult part ofmedical English learning. Consequently, the students who specialize in medicine willencounter various difficulties in understanding the medical literature, which is usuallywritten in English. Therefore, medical English vocabulary is usually believed to bedifficult and even boring to be learned.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
It is accepted that medical terminology is a key factor which hinders thestudents from achieving satisfactory learning outcomes in medical English. Brieflyspeaking, the features of medical vocabulary can be characterized by the difficulty inspelling, pronunciation, and meaning. Compared with daily words, medical Englishvocabulary poses more difficulties to students. So working out an efficient andeffective way becomes crucial and necessary.The study aims at testing a new way of vocabulary teaching in medical English.Based on the previous studies, the application of iconicity to vocabulary is feasible.Therefore, an iconicity-based instruction is proposed in this paper which intends toovercome the difficulties of the college students who specialize in medical courses.The study attempts to bring iconicity into the teaching of medical English vocabulary,and thus, exploring a new way of effective vocabulary teaching.It is hoped that this paper can be a supplement to the iconicity study anddevelops a new approach to the medical English vocabulary teaching. There are few studies at home that targeted at vocabulary teaching based on iconicity. This researchintends to enrich the study of this area, and thus being of both theoretical and practicalsignificance.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review
2.1 Key Concepts of Iconicity
Therefore,various definitions of iconicity have been given, while some of them are subtlydifferent, for their focusing point may vary according to their own study. XuGuozhang (1988) first introduced and translates the word ‘iconicity’ into ‘象似性’ inChina, but didn’t give an exact meaning from his own point of view. Shen Jiaxuan(1993), in his article, “The Problems of Syntax in Iconicity”, points out that the termiconicity, on the contrary of arbitrari，英语论文网站，英语论文范文
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