A Dynamic Study On The Effects Of Lexical Properties On Junior High School Students’ English Reading Comprehension

Many studies from all over the world have demonstrated that the effects of lexical properties on L2 reading comprehension are relatively significant.However,there is little agreement on how different lexical properties affect L2 learners’ word processing time and reading comprehension.In addition,rare studies have systematically explored the influence of lexical properties on reading comprehension for Chinese junior high school students with high and low-level language proficiency.Therefore,this paper takes word familiarity and word association intensity as the focus of this study,and takes different language levels as the conditions,makes an attempt to answer the following research questions:(1)Is the main effect of language proficiency significant?(2)Is the main effect of word familiarity significant?(3)Is the main effect of word association intensity significant?(4)Is there a significant interaction between language proficiency and word familiarity?(5)Is there a significant interaction between language proficiency and word association intensity?Thirty students from junior high school were recruited in this experiment.This research is made up of two experiments: 2(language level: high language proficiency vs.low language proficiency)×2(high word familiarity vs.low word familiarity)and 2(language level: high language proficiency vs.low language proficiency)×2(high word association intensity vs.low word association intensity).The present study has revealed that high word familiarity and high word association intensity have facilitative effects on word processing times,while low word familiarity and low word association intensity have inhibitory effects on word processing times.It goes on to explain how lexical properties and language proficiency affect word processing in L2 reading comprehension,and provides further evidence for L2 reading comprehension research,which opens a new perspective for future research.Teachers of junior high school English should place a greater emphasis on arousing students’ interest in studying lexical properties as part of the reading comprehension process.