Strategy Use Of Chinese Japanese Learners In Polysemous Word Meanings Understanding

Word ambiguity is widespread in languages around the world, which has gathered the attention of the vocabulary researchers. Native speakers can use the various meanings of a polysemy in different contexts accurately, but as for the second language learners, polysemy is considered an important factor related to the difficult of acquisition (Laufer1990). Because of excessive dependence on the dictionary and native language, the second language learners lack integrity mastery of polysemous word meanings, the meaning of storage is also relatively unsystematic. In addition, it is always that the acquisition of the center meaning is good, while the acquisition of the derivative meaning is poor. It is also true for Chinese learners of Japanese (Tanaka&Abe 1984; 今井 1993;2010; 麻生 2014). Before developing better polysemy learning and teaching methods to improve the acquisition of polysemy of second language learners, it is necessary to make clear the process and the strategies used by learners in understanding and the memorize different meanings of polysemous word. Therefore, this study aims to investigate and analysis the strategies used by Japanese professional students to memorize the meanings and approach to the unknown meanings of polysemous verbs with context, and the relationship between strategy use and the success rate of unknown meaning inferring. An interview investigation was carried out.The result of the survey shows that compared with the intermediate learners, the higher level learners tend to memory word meanings by phrases form, instead of depending on the mother tongue. Secondly, when coming across an unknown meaning, intermediate learners tend to depend on the use of native language knowledge, while the superior learners prefer the use of meaning expansion strategy and the strategy used would be more diverse. In addition, using multiple strategies at the same time is also very common. Regardless of Japanese level, learners are affected by mother tongue negatively, and they haven’t mastered polysemous word meanings comprehensively. It is presumably because that they dependent on mother tongue to excess when learning words.In recent years, linguistic researchers have been trying to apply the prototype theory of cognitive linguistics and word meaning expansion theory to the second language polysemy teaching. There are many empirical studies proved its effectiveness. According to the results, learners are not unaware of the expansion mechanism of polysemous word meanings completely, but limited to the meaning expansion easy to understand. A comprehensive and systematic learning of polysemy meanings network is still lacked. In extracurricular incidental vocabulary learning, the learners also haven’t grasped the use of unknown word meaning inferring strategy well. Therefore, this research propose that in the polysemous word teaching of future, teachers should guide students to understand the expansion mechanism between polysemous word meanings as soon as possible, strengthen the practice of speculating unknown semantic to help them learn second language polysemy more effectively, and memory polysemous word meaning network more comprehensively. As a learner, when coming across unknown word meanings, do not rely on a dictionary definition too much, but use the polysemous word meaning expansion theory or specific context meaning to speculate the meanings as far as possible, which contributes to deepening the memory of the derivative meaning.