An Empirical Study Of Chinese English Majors' L2 Mental Lexicon Organization

Vocabulary teaching plays a vital part in language teaching and learning, and the key to a profound understanding of the nature of vocabulary teaching is an understanding of the mental lexicon. Moreover, L2 Vocabulary researchers abroad and at home have shown great concern over mental lexicon. Therefore, it is necessary to explore Chinese EFL learners'mental lexicon links by employing word association test with a view to providing implications for vocabulary teaching.The subjects in this study were 40 first-year English majors in Jilin University. The instrument was a guided word association test.Quantitative and qualitative analysis of the data collected revealed the following major findings:1. As a whole, the L2 learners produced a higher proportion of meaningful responses and a slightly lower proportion of clang-other responses, which indicates that in the L2 mental lexicon, meaning plays a predominant role. But the semantic relation is not so tight.2. Considering word classes, the response patterns are slightly different. The organization of mental lexicon for verb tends to be phonologically related, which is different from nouns and adjectives that are semantically meaningful related.3. The familiarity of the prompt words is also an important factor affecting the organization of the L2 learners'mental lexicon. To those unfamiliar prompt words, the L2 learners produced the highest proportion of clang-other responses while to the familiar ones, the L2 learners produced the highest proportion of paradigmatic responses.The above findings are discussed from the perspectives of the reorganization of the L2 mental lexicon, the learning environments and techniques in vocabulary teaching. Finally, recommendations for future research on the related issues are also proposed.