Mental Lexicon Study And Its Implications On Reading Comprehension Task At College Students Level

Lexicon and reading are important ingredients of college English teaching and learning. All the basic skills like reading, speaking, writing, listening and translation, must be based on proficient mastery of lexicon. This thesis probes tentatively into the rationale of mental lexicon and its typical models, at the same time explores how these findings can be applied to college English teaching, mainly on reading comprehension tasks.Reading comprehension ability is a basic skill stipulated in national syllabus for college students. In fact, for most college students, reading activities serve as the major source of the input of their language knowledge. With the rapid development of internet and globalization, higher requirements are to be imposed on their reading ability.Concurrently, in almost every college, students have been exposed to courses for reading, i.e., the so-called extensive reading. The traditional teaching has laid great importance on the practice of reading skill, while neglecting the roles played by both the innate mechanism of lexical cognition and the mental lexicon in reading process. Also, the relations between ML (Abbreviation of mental lexicon) and reading are largely neglected. Fluent reading, in both L1 and L2, must be based on rapid and automatic decoding of printed words. This thesis, however, is to explore tentatively the structure of L2 mental lexicon and demonstrate its storage and retrieval mechanism, aiming to build an interactive relation between reading and ML construction. Admittedly, many factors may affect reader's reading ability, such as one's vocabulary scale, syntactic knowledge, background knowledge, working memory, and motives, but among them mental lexicon is the primal factor affecting reading competence. Thus, the study of ML will expedite the reading comprehension teaching for college students. To write this paper, we expect to cultivate the awareness of mental lexicon building among college students which has been largely ignored, and to motivate an interactive relation between reading and mental lexicon building.