The Study Of Chinese Learner L2 Vocabulary Acquisition-cognitive And Psychological Perspectives

Knowing a word entails much more than just knowing its meaning. One of the author's aims in this dissertation is to demonstrate, via the exploration of the relevant issues and their possible pedagogical applications, that vocabulary does in fact play a central role in language learning, as opposed to the supporting role it has traditionally been allocated in language teaching methodologies. Another aim is to provide learners (and other interested practitioners) with the cognitive and psychological perspectives they need to make informed decisions about learning L2 vocabulary. In this dissertation I present a framework that expands the traditional concept of vocabulary acquisition to cover a wider range of procedures for acquiring L2 vocabulary for L2 learners. These procedures can be hopefully useful for the L2 learners, especially the Chinese learners as well as providing tools for conducting L2 instruction into the lexical dimension of language.In this dissertation the author has language relativism and experientialism as the theoretical foundation. Based on these theories, the author tries to conduct the research in L2 vocabulary acquisition from cognitive and psychological perspectives. This dissertation consists of 8 chapters.In Chapter 1 the author begins with a brief history of the shift in status of vocabulary in language research and applied linguistics. After many years of neglect, the study of vocabulary in applied linguistics is now flourishing. Evidence in Chinese learner English corpus shows that lexical errors make up the major part in L2 errors by the learners. Up to now, there is no unified systematic theoretical framework about L2 vocabulary acquisition. Therefore it is both theoretically and practically important and valuable to establish an approach in vocabulary acquisition for the Chinese learners.As always, a good start can be made by a literature review of what has been done before. The review in Chapter 2 will look at studies that have been made in the area of L2 vocabulary acquisition. The author makes a survey chronologically and presents the expanding scope of L2 vocabulary acquisition research. The research conducted abroad in this field did not consider the Chinese learner context and thus cannot be adopted without adaptation, while L2 acquisition...