Mental Lexicon Studies And Their Implications For ESL Vocabulary Learning/Teaching

Vocabulary has always played an important role in ESL teaching. However, because of the influence of traditional linguistics, vocabulary teaching was given a secondary status in ESL teaching. Recently under the influence of psycholinguistic study, especially the mental lexicon studies, vocabulary teaching became the focus of ESL teaching again.Mental lexicon studies how words are organized and accessed. L1 mental lexicon studies reveal that words are organized as a semantic network. There are many factors that affect lexical access such as context effect, word frequency effect, lexicality effect and semanticality effect. To account for these factors, many lexical access models emerge. The logogen model and the cohort model are the most powerful ones. The former mainly explains the lexical access of visual words, while the latter mainly accounts for the lexical access of auditory words. Based on L1 mental lexicon studies and the analysis of the relationship between L1 and L2, L2 mental lexicon studies are implemented. Whether L2 mental lexicon and L1 mental lexicon are stored separately or integrated with each other is the key issue in this area. A shared distributed asymmetrical model is the most realistic model. The L2 lexical development can be divided into three stages: the formal stage, the L1 lemma mediation stage and the L2 integration stage. According to the above analysis, we make clear the formation and development of L2 mental lexicon.Much useful implication can be obtained from the foregoing studies in both L1 and L2 mental lexicon. The three stage division of L2 lexical development tells us that it is necessary to teach learners at different stages with different techniques. Since vocabulary is so important in ESL learning and teaching, vocabulary teaching should acquire an independent status in ESL teaching.