On Conceptual Representations Of English Content Words For Chinese EFL Learners

Although FLL (Foreign language learning) has been focused on enthusiastically for many years in China, the"general failure"still exists. In the field of foreign language teaching, people have been pursuing for an effective teaching approach all the time. Most of them have tried various methods from the aspects of SLA, outward learning circumstance, learners'motivation, etc. rather than concerning the underlying factors of the idea, EFL (English as a foreign language) in China, or exploring the characteristics of FLL in terms of the relation between language and thought, knowledge and cognition.The present study attempts to illustrate the conceptual representation characteristics of English content words and their equivalent Chinese words for Chinese EFL learners so as to analyze the underlying factors in the light of Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Double Structures theory, which attempts to illustrate the formation and the development process of foreign language concept representation and the accessing mechanism of foreign language vocabulary in the framework of bilingual thinking and cognition mode. The author discusses this theory from the perspective of how two languages are organized extremely orderly in memory, namely, at the beginning of foreign language learning, the foreign language vocabulary sets up psychological relations with concept with the help of mother language and later forms its own schema of mental lexicon. With the improvement of foreign language competence, language learners gradually form systematic foreign language cognitive structure and knowledge structure. In foreign language cognition process, the foreign language knowledge structure access foreign words meaning from mother language knowledge structure through the mediation of concept.The investigation was carried out in the form of questionnaire. The participants were 80 college students from Lanzhou University and Northwest Normal University, each 30 of whom have passed CET4 and CET6, the other 20 have passed TEM8. The survey was carried out to check learners'familiarity degree of the concepts represented by English words and the equivalent Chinese words in accordance with their FL level, and furthermore, to investigate their preference degree of choosing English or Chinese or both of the two as target language to express themselves in certain context as well as the psychological features for their choosing. The questionnaire includes two parts, word test and writing task with willingly chosen words following an open question. The word test part of each level, CET4, CET6 and TEM8, is further divided into two parts, English part and Chinese part. All of the words were selected from the English vocabulary book of each level alphabetically, the Chinese ones were the equivalents of English ones. As for the second part, writing task with voluntarily chosen words from the word test and an open question inquiring the reason for choosing certain language to complete the writing, the purpose is to acquire the participants'mental feature while writing.At last the following findings are reached:1.Chinese EFL learners'familiarity degree of the concepts represented by the English words is much higher than that of English words themselves, which shows that the representation of FL and MT words, FLL bases on a rather mature system of cognition and knowledge consistent with MT. Chinese-English bilinguals own separated Chinese Cognition-Knowledge Structure as well as English Cognition-Knowledge Structure. Successful semantic access is due to that they share a common storage of concept;2.The mechanism for conceptual representation for different English levels is different., they retrieveEnglish in different ways. More proficient English learners get access to meaning directly from concept; while for less proficient bilinguals, the successful semantic retrieval is on the basis of that the English information is transmitted to concept first, and then the information is projected to Chinese Knowledge Structure repeatedly for the connection between foreign language and concept is vague.3. The features of FLL and usage of different levels are various. Comparing with the English levels, the motivation of FLL and usage is pro rate, while the negative transfer from the MT is verse ratio.With the perspective of EFL in China, the findings as well as empirical results offer several enlightenments for FLL, i.e. multi-form language teaching, making rational use of mother language, association is needed in FLL process.