Relationship Between Foreign Language Proficiency And Association Patterns Of Words Learned Through Reading

Many studies on foreign/second language (L2) learning prove a reciprocal relationship between L2 proficiency and further language learning, that is, more proficient learners gain more language knowledge in the same learning task, which, in turn, more effectively promotes their L2 proficiency. In the word association studies, researchers find that learners of different L2 proficiency respond in different associative patterns to the words that are claimed familiar, which indicates their different structures of mental lexicon. The present study sets out to explore whether learners of different L2 proficiency generate different association patterns of new words that are learned through reading. The association pattern is measured in terms of the proportions of paradigmatic, syntagmatic and phonologically related words.Participants in this study are 100 students in the Southwest University, including 51 freshmen majoring in Teaching Chinese as a Foreign Language,35 juniors majoring in English and 14 post graduates majoring in English and American literature, Linguistics or Applied Linguistics. The experiment consists of four parts:(1) the C-test as the language proficiency test, (2) the Vocabulary Knowledge Scale (VKS) for the purpose of judging words that are familiar or unfamiliar to the participants before the learning session (Only the words that are judged as unfamiliar are counted for analysis), (3) a reading passage with the English definitions and Chinese translation counterparts of the ten target words in the margin, and (4) the word association test.The results surprisingly show no effect of language proficiency on the pattern of word association. However, further analysis suggests that more proficient L2 learners are more likely to give semantically related words. The results are discussed from four aspects:(1) the drawbacks in the experiment's implementation may have a great impact on the data; (2) they are still consistent with the results of some past empirical studies; (3) the lexical development, regardless of the L2 proficiency, may follow the same route, such as the model proposed by Jiang (2000), (4) the present categorization of word associations may be not sensitive enough to differentiate more proficient learners from less proficient ones. Thus further studies are in need to work out a new categorization in the light of semantic and psycholinguistic theories. The word association technique is also implicative in L2 vocabulary teaching and learning.