A Study On Paradigmatic Word Association Ability Of Chinese EFL Learners At Intermediate-Advanced Level

The study on paradigmatic word association ability has been a very practical topic. For EFL learners, this ability greatly influences students’ability to produce language. In China, English teaching always puts emphasis on students’ decoding ability while neglecting their ability of encoding. Most scholars focus on collocation and few of them study on Chinese students’paradigmatic word association ability.This thesis adopts comparative analysis research approach. By ensuring the effectiveness of key concepts in Longman Language Activator (LLA),10key concepts are chosen to construct their paradigmatic word association network (PWAN). Then,50sophomores were selected to finish the related questionnaires and the students’PWAN are constructed. By comparing the two networks, the study shows the paradigmatic word association ability of Chinese EFL learners at intermediate-advanced level.The study aims to answer the following three questions:(1) How does LLA organize words and expressions that have associative relation in a key concept? And what are the word associative networks of these concepts?(2) To what extent can Chinese EFL learners activate the concepts chosen from LLA? And what are their word associative networks?(3) What are the similarities and differences between these two kinds of networks?The major findings are as follows:(1) By analyzing the related words, the menu of meanings and the subentries, the networks of LLA are quite neat and clear with abundant subentries including synonyms, antonyms and hyponyms. Key concepts in the same part of speech have similar forms of networks and the adjectives’paradigmatic associative relations are the richest.(2) Chinese EFL students’PWAN are quite simple. On average, students can only activate about10%words compared to that of LLA. Most of the activated words are synonyms.(3) The similarity of the two networks is that the networks differ when they meet different parts of speech and the vocabulary of adjectives is much bigger than that of nouns and verbs. The vocabulary of verbs is rather small. The difference between the two networks lies in the classification and richness of words. The networks of LLA have more classifications and richer vocabulary than that of Chinese EFL students.Findings of the study clearly show that our students’ weak ability to associate paradigmatic words and provide evidence of the shortages of our country’s English teaching. Meanwhile, the findings provide valuable reference to English teaching of vocabulary, writing and translation.