Chinese Adult EFL Learners' Bilingual Thinking Mechanism In English Reading Viewed From The Perspective Of "Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Double Structures"

Reading is essential for English learning, because it's one of the important accesses of inputting English knowledge and the main approach of collecting language materials. The learners can consolidate what they have learnt and get to know some new knowledge through reading, which sets the stage for the development of listening, speaking, writing and translation. English reading in L1 environment is a complicated physiological and psychological process. Therefore, it bears strong theoretical and practical significances to explore the bilingual thinking mechanism lying in Chinese adults' English reading."Cognition-Knowledge Bilingual Double Structures (CKBDS)" hypothesis holds that there are L1 and foreign language's knowledge structures and the corresponding L1 and foreign language's cognition structures. The four components in the CKBDS affect and restrict each other, affecting the learner's foreign language learning process together (Yin Demo, 2006). Basing on the review of related theory on foreign language reading and pointing out the shortcomings of the former researches, and combining with the latest research fruits of cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and mental science, this paper starts from the deduction of the relationship between language and thinking under the CKBDS hypothesis and explores and concludes the bilingual thinking mechanism of adults whose L1 is Chinese in English reading. The conclusion of this research demonstrates and enriches the "CKBDS" theory and has certain practical significance on present college English reading teaching.This paper consists of seven chapters, and the main contents of each chapter are as follows:Chapter one gives brief introduction on some concepts such as language, thinking, bilingual thinking and adults' foreign language reading, etc. The purpose, approach and significance of the research are also defined in this chapter. Chapter two reviews some theories concerning foreign language reading and puts forward the shortcomings of related theories which include the two hypotheses on L2 reading, the three models of L2 reading, and the views on L1 or L1 thinking's function in L2 reading. Chapter 3 generalizes the different brain mechanisms of the learners comprehending the two different languages, English and Chinese, from the perspective of physiological basis, which supports the "CKBDS" theory in terms of physiological linguistics. Chapter four introduces the "CKBDS" hypothesis and the relationship between language and thinking under the framework of this hypothesis in detail. Chapter five explores the concrete bilingual thinking mechanism of adults' English reading basing on the analysis of theories in the former chapters through two experiments. The first experiment shows that Chinese language proficiency, Chinese thinking ability and English language proficiency are the significant predicting variables of English reading ability, which testifies and enriches the "CKBDS" hypotheses, and also develop the two hypotheses on L2 reading. The second experiment shows that there are differences in the application of the two kinds of thinking among the learners with different English language proficiency. Chapter six constructs the figure of the bilingual thinking mechanism of Chinese adults' English reading basing on the further analysis and conclusion of the result drawn from the experiments, and especially makes it clear that semantic meaning is of great importance in the mechanism. Chapter seven briefly generalizes the implications and limitations of this research. Basing on theoretical analysis and experimental investigation, the paper reaches to the following conclusions:1) There are different brain mechanisms and different cerebral cortex areas activated in the Chinese adults' comprehension of English and Chinese discourses.2) English language proficiency, Chinese language proficiency, English thinking ability and Chinese thinking ability, which are the four essential components under the framework of "CKBDS" hypothesis, are vital to Chinese adults' English reading. There is an interactive mechanism between English thinking and Chinese thinking in the learner's L2 reading.3) The influence of learners' L1 language proficiency on their FL reading can not be neglected. In the Chinese adults' English reading, although what comes into the learners' visual channel is English, the Chinese language proficiency of them has big effect and strong predictability on their reading comprehension. Chinese language proficiency affects the reading process indirectly through the mutual abstract semantic representation of the two languages.4) Semantic meaning is not only the medium of the switch between the two language forms, English and Chinese, but the medium of the switch between English thinking and Chinese thinking, which well explains why there is no direct connection between Chinese and English, Chinese thinking and English thinking respectively in the figure of language and thinking within the framework of the "CKBDS" theory.5) It is shown by the regression model that Chinese language proficiency, Chinese thinking ability and English language proficiency are the significant predicting variables on English reading ability. These three predictors can predict 98.8% variance of the dependent variable, English reading ability. Chinese language proficiency is stronger than Chinese thinking ability whereas weaker than English language proficiency in terms of predicting ability.6) The concrete application of English thinking and Chinese thinking varies with the learners' English proficiency in their English reading. With the increase of their English proficiency, the learners' superficial reliance on Chinese declines, while the Chinese thinking's function in terms of cognitive and meta-cognitive monitoring weighs more and more; as to the use of English thinking, the learners with relatively low English proficiency just stay at the stage of words and sentences' understanding, limited in proportion and low in accuracy rate, while for those with relatively high English proficiency, the accuracy rate in figuring out the meanings of words and sentences improves a lot and the proportion of English thinking used in identifying ideas of the text and meta-cognitive monitoring increases.7) Comparing with English thinking, the function of Chinese thinking is more obvious in the learners with different English proficiency, which has a lot to do with their learning environment in which English is taken as a foreign language.