Linguistic And Psychological Analysis On Word Selection And Specification Of Word List

As an important component of language and the bridge of communication, vocabulary plays essential role in our daily life.The linguists and educators and learners have spent much time and energy on vocabulary research and learning, but the vocabulary item has still been torturing the linguists, educators and learners. This thesis will make a discussion about one of the English vocabulary learning problems: how to edit an ideal vocabulary book to help the vocabulary learning of Chinese.From those famous word lists such as Thorndike's The Teacher's Word Book, M. West's A General Service List, Ogden's Basic English, and Hindmarsh's Cambridge English Lexicon, it may be found that each of these word lists has its own special characteristics, but at the same time they also share some general characteristics. From linguistic point of view, the word selection and edition of word lists share some common criteria: Richard's "familiarity" criteria, Carter's "coreness" criteria, and Sinclair's "commonness" criteria, etc; from psychological point of view, it is supposed that word recognition may be affected by psychological factors such as frequency effect, recency effect, repetition, etc.Comparing with those common word lists, some word lists in China are far less satisfying for they are edited in the subjective view of list-editors, not the objective linguistic criteria and psychological considerations, which will cause heavy learning burden for the L2 learners. Based on those linguistic criteria and psychological considerations, this thesis makes a general analysis on word lists in China to find their related advantages and disadvantages, and tentatively sums up the essential elements of an ideal vocabulary book.It is hoped that this study can provide some help for the present foreign language learning in China, especially in the word selection and specification of word lists.This thesis is divided into three parts:Part one (chapter I ?chapter III): background: introduction of vocabulary; distinction of basic concepts; and common strategies the learners use and common problems the learners encounter in their learning.Part two (chapter IV ?chapter V): theoretical foundation: linguistic criteria and psychological considerations applied in word list compilation.Part three (chapter VI): application: applying above theories to analyze the word list in China, and abstracting the essential elements of an ideal vocabulary book.