Imagen sensorial de la palabratesauro mimético y diccionario temático de la lengua inglesa

Resum

My job as a teacher of English in the pre-universitary stages has led me to realize that the older the students are the less creative they are. Most students tend to memorize, instead of developing certain creative skills, in order to study a subject, in that case, English language. We are in a competitive society and we tend not to reflect about our own learning. Nowadays, we can find two differentiated groups: those who do not want to study because they have already been classified as ‘bad’ students and those who only want to achieve a good mark. In other words, most of them are not interested in learning. Real learners are disappearing because of this competitive society. Starting from this assumption, we believe that if more creative tasks are shown to students they can find different ways to learn a subject. In our case, we believe that if our students learn to perceive the phonetic symbolism they will be able to guess the meaning easier, especially those students who have lost their interest in English. Although vocabulary is usually learnt in collocations or in context, we want to present the word by analyzing its phonemes. We believe that sound and image of the word should be linked as a device to acquire vocabulary. Our thesis consists of a theoretical part and an experimental one in order to put into practice the formal background. The former deals with different studies about the origin of language, the phonetic symbolism and approaches to learn a language – all these points are led to show the importance of lexis in acquiring a language and the latter focus on the presentation of different tasks related to the phonetic symbolism to conclude with a word-book (a mimetic thesaurus and a thematic dictionary). This wordbook is seen in two parts. The first one is more analytic and it is divided into semantic fields whereas the second one is more holistic divided into authentic situations. We present the words along with images (videos and pictures) so that students can distinguish and differentiate the meaning properly. One of the main conclusions drawn from the experimental part of the research is that students with a low level in English learn more fluently with the approach we present in this thesis. Bearing this idea in mind, we have gathered a part of the vocabulary in this mimetic thesaurus and thematic dictionary, whichis the main part of the dissertation, to use it in the classroom