According to papers and monographs, we pide the development of Cognitive Linguistics in China into three period. The first period is introduction and application period. The second period is multiple-aspect development period. And the third period is the development, reflection and internationalization period.

At the beginning of this century, Cognitive Linguistics manifests its tendency as following:

(1)The expansion and deepening of original research field and issue

(2)The expansion of cross-disciplinary and application research.

(3)The research methods develop towards practical demonstration. 

1.2 Significance of the Thesis

Cognitive Linguistics makes contribution on English language learning in two aspects. One is providing a new perspective for contrastive analysis between Chinese and English. Another is providing a new way to explain language phenomenon.CL define three characteristic of language include embodiment, metaphor, and motivation, which decides its view of language. CL regards language as a motivation symbol system made by construction, a conceptual image schema and a social communicative tool. This language view can help learners find some effective way to learn language, making some rules for language study and promoting deep understanding and memory. We should clearly know that language has characteristic of arbitrariness so we cannot count every language phenomenon reasonably, for example, there are many idioms in English which we do not know how they come into being. But there still exist some evidence and theory that can be used to account part of those special language phenomenon.CL can provide new angle of view for language learning. At the same time, it can give important inspiration for English teaching. This essay will focus on the Cognitive Linguistics’ study on English vocabulary and sentence pattern, drawing a conclusion about the function of CL’s study in these two aspects as well as finding out ways to put these theory and researches into practical application and comes up with new approach to English teaching, which can improve English learning efficiency.