Word Association And Chinese EFL Learners' Lexical Development

Many researches have proved the central role of vocabulary acquisition in language acquisition. Therefore, considering Chinese EFL learners' inferior learning environment to that of native speakers', the question "how can classroom research possibly help EFL learners' lexical development?" becomes the focus of Chinese EFL teachers' attention. Moreover, L2 vocabulary researchers abroad have shown great concern over mental lexicon, the study of which has been widely carried out. Of all reported studies, word-association test is of keen interest to most researchers. It is therefore highly necessary to explore Chinese EFL learners' mental lexicon links by employing word association test with a view to providing implications for their lexical development.This thesis begins with an overview of the up-to-date research findings on L2 vocabulary acquisition along with the introduction of the mental lexicon and its investigation method. After that, it reports a small-scale study, conducted at Jiangnan University in the autumn of 2001, which involved 100 freshmen and 30 EFL teachers respectively as lower-level and advanced-level learners. After a careful analysis of both quantitative and qualitative data, two categories of findings were obtained concerning Chinese EFL learners' mental lexicon links in terms of semantic and phonological links.(1) As for semantic links, lower-level learners tended to make paradigmatic associations more, especially co-ordinational ones. In addition, they preferred to link their responses to world knowledge more. Advanced-level learners, on the other hand, produced more collocational links, though their responses still bore strong pragdigmatic links, which was represented by their strong synonymous links. Responses of both groups of learners were almost in the same syntactic categories as those of stimuli. Lower-level learners elicited more syntactic links. Verbs seem to be bonded most tightly while adjectives turned out to be least tightly connected in both groups oflearners' mental lexicon.(2) In view of phonological links, all Chinese EFL learners showed a similar tendency of associating considerable responses phonologically related to stimuli with the same beginning and ending sounds or the same stress patterns or word lengths. Lower-level learners' responses were more likely to be phonologically dependent, characterized by substantial phonologically unrelated responses and short word responses.Based on the above findings, this thesis provides the following implications for Chinese EFL learners' lexical development.(l)For lower-level learners, vocabulary teaching should lay emphasis on theelaboration of words' sense relationship, especially co-ordinational links.Situational vocabulary teaching is still applicable. Adjective learning needs tobe carefully planned.(2) For advanced-level learners, the focus should be on the collocational use and idiomatic use of words. Learning of lexical phrases and synonymy learning are two critical issues to be considered at this learning stage.(3) Compilation of vocabulary teaching materials should consider the role of phonological links between words. For lower-level learners, words with semantically unrelated phonological similarities should be grouped together. Second, short words, especially those with the same beginning and ending sounds or those with stress vowels in the form of CV sequence at the beginning or those with the same stress patterns should be presented particularly for this earlier stage of lexical development. For advanced-level learners, however, words should be grouped with semantically related phonological similarities or the same beginning and ending sounds or the same stress patterns. Long words should be categorized into groups with those bearing similar endings and those with the same VC sequences put together.