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Chapter 1 Introduction

The present conventional teaching method in senior English classes is not so satisfactorythat it needs to be changed. For this problem, many scholars and first-line English teachershave devoted themselves to the English vocabulary teaching over the past years. They studiedhard and tried to find a new way to improve the English vocabulary teaching. Unfortunately,the actual results of these solutions have been unsatisfory. Therefore, this thesis is expected tosolve the existing problem of fossilization from the perspective of metonymy.In view of this, the first chapter makes clear the research purpose which is trying to studythe feasibility of applying metonymy to dispel lexical fossilization in senior high school'sEnglish vocabulary teaching. The author hopes this thesis can provide an effective method ofvocabulary teaching and be of great value to both teachers and students.

1.1 Research Background
In 2003, the New English Curriculum Standards was published by the Ministry ofEducation. Higher requirements are set for senior students to master much more words. Forexample, students are required to master about 3,300 words by the eighth grade, while about4,500 words by the ninth grade. However, according to the earlier preliminary observationand investigation, the author reaches a preliminary realization: high school students have asmall size of vocabulary. More than half of the subjects believe their vocabulary size is below2,000. This phenomenon is very common, which seriously hinders the students' improvement.What’s more, after the students have mastered about two thousand vocabularies, it is veryslow to expand the development of vocabulary on this basis despite the students have madegreat efforts. Another important problem is the meaning of words. Most of the students cannotmaster all the meanings of a word. Generally speaking, students can only remember one ortwo meanings of a word at most.The above-mentioned phenomenon can be concluded as lexical fossilization. Theconcept of “fossilization” was firstly proposed by Larry Selinker (1972) which gets wideacceptance by scholars in the field of second language acquisition (SLA) throughout theworld. Fossilization refers to the failure of the usage of a language form to achieve the targetlanguage standards, and maintain the level of stagnation in foreign language acquisition.Lexical fossilization includes two aspects: the number of word and word meaning.Fossilization in the number of words means that student’s vocabulary size stops to increaseand even some students' vocabulary size start falling obviously; fossilization in word meaningindicate that students can not use vocabulary flexibly. That is to say, students know only oneaspect of a word and fail to master the phenomenon of polysemy.
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1.2 Research Purpose and Significance
The purpose of the research is to study the feasibility of applying metonymy to dispellexical fossilization in Senior high school's English vocabulary teaching. Through onesemester’s experiment of applying metonymy, the study is expected to enlarge the students’vocabulary as well as to improve the students’ memory of word meanings.As for the research significance, the study is expected to benefit for both front-lineteachers and students. For front-line teachers, the study may be of great value to help teacherschange the irrational way of vocabulary teaching and thus enhance