Comparison Of Semantic Access Mechanism Of Proficient And Less Proficient Chinese EFL Learners

As Gass & Selinker (2001:158) hold that language acquisition can to large extent come down to vocabulary acquisition, the importance of vocabulary teaching is becoming more and more manifest. Traditionally, English vocabulary teaching in China tends to overemphasize repetition and mechanical memorizing, whereas little attention is paid to learners'active construction and cognitive abilities, resulting in less-effective and time-consuming vocabulary learning. It is suggested in cognitive and psychological researches that people's cognition has a certain mechanism and order. In this thesis, the author tries to explore the difference of words semantic access mechanism between proficient and less proficient Chinese EFL learners from a psychological view, hoping to provide pedagogical implications and a new approach to promoting English vocabulary teaching in Chinese context. Three lexical decision tasks are conducted to investigate the priming effect of the stimulus on targets. Subjects are 106 university students with 52 English majors in Grade Four and 54 non-English majors in Grade One. The results are: when the stimulus (English) and targets (English) are related semantically, significant priming effect is obtained (Exp.1) on both levels of proficiency in spite of the tiny difference in response time; when the stimulus (Chinese) and targets (English) are related semantically, significant cross-language priming effect occurs either in proficient or less proficient students; when the translation equivalent of stimulus (Chinese) and targets (English) are the same or similar phonetically, the cross-language priming effect is manifest for both groups. After the detailed analysis and inference, we can make it clear that, university students either in English major of Grade Four or non-English major of Grade One can get access to the semantic conceptual representation of words in L2 directly or with the help of the translation equivalents in their mother tongue. These findings show good agreement with the Asymmetry Model of Kroll, in which both lexical and conceptual links are active in the bilingual memory, but they assume stronger word associations from L2 to L1 and weaker in the opposite direction. Besides, L1 words have stronger connections to concept than L2 words. But with the development of L2, i.e. with increased proficiency in L2, L2-concept connection becomes stronger and stronger. These findings have some pedagogical implications for second language teaching, especially vocabulary teaching:we should create a multiple cognitive environment which will facilitate students' transformation from lexical knowledge to lexical capacity. The combination of communicative context and formal instruction enables students to reduce reliance on the first language as early as possible and strengthen the connection between L2 to the common conceptual representation.