Study On English Mental Lexicon Of Chinese EFL Learners

Vocabulary is central to language and of critical importance to a typicallanguage learner. With reference to Chinese EFL learners' inferior learningenvironment to that of native speakers', the question "how can languageteaching possibly help EFL learners' lexical development?" becomes the focusof Chinese EFL teachers' attention. Scholars, teachers and educators involvedin second language learning have pursued researches into vocabularyacquisition from different aspects. Moreover, L2 vocabulary researchersabroad and at home have shown great concern over mental lexicon. Of allstudies, word-association test is of keen interest to most researchers. It istherefore highly necessary to explore Chinese EFL learners' mental lexiconlinks by employing word association test with a view to providing implicationsfor their lexical development.This thesis starts with an overview of the up-to-date research findings onL2 vocabulary acquisition, which covers Chapter One. Chapter Two deals withthe theoretical description of mental lexicon, which includes the notion ofmental lexicon, the relationship between mental lexicon and book dictionary,organization of the mental lexicon and three stages of lexical development inL2. The empirical study is performed to examine the relationships betweenword-association responses of Chinese EFL learners and native Englishspeakers, which covers Chapter Three and Chapter Four. The former chapterintroduces the research methodology (word association test) adopted in thisstudy, which reports a small-scale study, conducted at Harbin University ofScience and Technology, and three aspects in data analysis(semantic,syntacticand phonological links). And Chapter Four presents detailed discussions of theresearch findings. After a careful analysis of data, it is safe to get theconclusion that the L2 mental lexicon is systematically different from the L1mental lexicon and phonology plays a much larger role in the L2 mentallexicon. Finally, the last chapter is the conclusion of this paper, which includesthe summary, pedagogical implications and the limitations of the presentresearch.