Proper etymological knowledge can help us to guard against and avoid some common Chinese mistakes. For example, we know that "step" is an ideographic character with left and right feet in tandem, so we won't write the second half of it as "less"; Knowing that the original meaning of "Chu" is "the beginning of tailoring", so from "knife" to "clothes", it is not written as "finger"; ..... Similarly, many people misspell consensus (now translated as "* * * knowledge") as consensus (many British people also make this mistake), but they don't understand that this word is homologous to consensus and has nothing to do with the census. Assent, which is synonymous with consent, naturally cannot be confused with ascend, which is interpreted as climbing. Another example is privilege, which is often misspelled as previlege, because it is not understood that it is actually homologous to private, and there is no prefix pre-meaning "first" or "before".
Etymological knowledge can also help us understand the meaning of words, especially when we learn phonetic symbols like English. Words in Chinese are composed of meaningful words, such as "autonomy", "linguistics", "subcutaneous injection", "anarchism" and "200 years", which can generally be expressed in words. Although the understanding may not be very accurate, at least you can guess. On the surface, English equivalents such as autonomy, philology, anarchism and 200 years cannot be decomposed into simple elements. If you meet them for the first time, it's hard to guess what they mean. In fact, many English long words are composed of two or more "word-forming elements"; The number of words is huge, and new words are constantly emerging. No one can say that unfamiliar words will not be encountered in daily reading. However, the number of word-building elements is limited; If you master the common word-formation elements (such as auto-, philo-, -log, hypo-, -derm, an-, -arch, bi-, cent-, etc. ), the meaning of new words is often easy to imagine, and you can only look it up in the dictionary when you need a very accurate explanation, which is very helpful to improve your reading ability and interest.
For words from fairy tales, literary works or historical events, in order to understand them thoroughly and use them correctly, we must also find out their allusions.
Paying attention to etymology can also help us remember words. When we study Chinese characters, we will not regard strokes as randomly stacked lines, but use concepts such as radicals, semantic symbols and phonetic symbols to explain how the word is created, thus helping us to remember. When learning English, you will encounter new words with many letters. Studying how they are formed will also make them easier to remember. In the English-Chinese Dictionary (revised second edition) published by the Commercial Press, the longest word is pulmonary silicosis, which is 45 letters long. It's hard to remember the unexpected method. Why did the British medical community give this disease such a long-winded name? This certainly makes sense: knowing the meaning of each element will make it much easier to remember.
In addition, learning etymology can help us understand some abnormal phenomena encountered in Chinese learning. There are many puzzling examples of English pronunciation, such as islands, debts, receipts and instructions, which are not pronounced according to obvious pronunciation rules. Although we can regard English pronunciation as unreasonable without asking why, it is not good for learning. On the contrary, when we find out why these words are "different" from the process of their emergence and evolution, our study will not only increase our interest, but also have better learning effect. (Zeng Yucheng 1992: 1-) Culture is the sum of material civilization and spiritual civilization created by human beings in the long history. However, the relationship between language and culture is so inseparable: language is rooted in culture, language embodies culture, and language also affects culture. Vocabulary is the most basic part of language. A word is sometimes a crystal clear dewdrop, and sometimes it is like a separable colored pebble, which contains and reflects the colorful cultural background behind the language. Direct vocabulary teaching should emphasize the relationship between vocabulary and culture. By learning some words with rich cultural connotations and the most important cultural background knowledge in English language, it will certainly bring unexpected convenience and benefits to our English learning and cross-cultural communication!
(4) Reading aloud-Lexical motivation (iconicity) The teaching vocabulary of knowledge is not arbitrary in etymology, word formation, meaning or the relationship between vocabulary and culture, and there are all motivations of one kind or another. In recent years, the study of iconicity of language symbols at home and abroad has been deepened, and its research results have increasingly shown the iconicity of vocabulary (including syntax and discourse). ) have obvious motives. In direct vocabulary teaching, the results of iconicity research can be directly used for reference to organize and implement direct vocabulary teaching more effectively. In recent years, articles on iconicity, pictograph, iconicity (Zhang Shihe, 200 1: P 190) and English vocabulary iconicity at home and abroad can be used for reference to directly guide English vocabulary teaching. The rise of lexical semantics and phonology at home and abroad will also provide some powerful guidance for direct vocabulary teaching.
The meaning of vocabulary (meaning of vocabulary as a language symbol) is the essential content of language as a cognitive and communicative tool, so it is necessary to study the meaning of vocabulary and its derivation motivation, which will also enable students to master the meaning of vocabulary more scientifically and conveniently. J. Austin pointed out in his paper The Meaning of Words (196 1) that the meaning of words constitutes a category, and the meaning does not have the same characteristics, but is related in some way. Such as "healthy body", "healthy exercise" and "healthy complex". The meaning of "health" is different in different collocations, but the meanings are related. The meaning of "health" in "healthy body" is the central meaning, which Austin calls the primary nuclear meaning. Other meanings: make someone. There is a central causal relationship between health in "healthy exercise" and the result of healthy body in "healthy complex" (Austin thinks this is a relationship that partially replaces the whole). In this way, "health" has a central meaning and extended meaning, and these meanings are not arbitrary, but constitute a related category, which is natural, unconscious and true in heart. (Zhao Yanfang, 200 1: 2 1-22) Austin also studied what Lakoff later called "metaphor" (he called it "analogy" at that time), such as the foot of a mountain and the foot of a list, and thought that this conceptual structure was the result of people's cognition of the human body projected onto other things. Austin also noticed the chain phenomenon between various meanings in the meaning category of a word, that is, the chain change of meaning: A→B→C→D…. Although the connection between A and D may be unrecognizable, there is a certain connection between meanings A, B, B, C, C and D, with A called the core meaning and B, C and D called the extension meaning of chain. Although Austin's viewpoint didn't form a force at that time, his main contribution was to bring language into the research field of philosophy and cognition, explaining that "language is an aspect of cognition in the final analysis" (Lakoff, 1987, p.2 1). (ibid., p. 22)