Investigating Chinese Junior Middle School English Learners' L2 Mental Lexicon And Implications For Vocabulary Teaching

Second language vocabulary acquisition in recent decades has become one of the hottest areas of psycholinguistics and applied linguistics. Mental lexicon has become an independent and currently lively field in psycholinguistics. Mental lexicon is defined as internal lexicon, in which all the knowledge related to word is represented. To explore how lexicons are related and stored especially in L2 mental lexicon can improve vocabulary acquisition. At present, many Chinese scholars have attempted to reveal the nature of Chinese English learners'mental lexicon and great progress has been made in this field. The previous researchers have investigated the Chinese L2 mental lexicon at the tertiary level, ignoring the state of L2 mental lexicon of students of the secondary level, particularly, and junior middle school (JMS). At present, JMS L2 learners usually complain that they have difficulties in remembering words, even if they began to learn English when they were in Grade III, primary school. Many students also learn English in their spare time at weekends and on holidays at commercial English training schools where their parents pay a high tuition fee. That is, one of the first problems a JMS L2 learner encounters is how to memorize a massive amount of foreign words. Another common phenomenon exists among JMS L2 learners that in communication or exam, a seemingly familiar word appears in their mind, but they fail to express them in sound and write them in orthography. Besides, as for JMS learners, they wonder what effective ways are in which they can enlarge their vocabulary in both quality and quantity. In the view of the problems above, it is necessary to explore these Chinese JMS learners'L2 mental lexicon links by employing word association test to provide some implications for vocabulary teaching.Ninety junior middle school students were randomly chosen from different junior middle schools in Wafangdian, Dalian. There were 30 students from each grade. The instrument was word association test. The result shows that:1. L2 mental lexicon organization of JMS learners is semantic links based on L1 concept, or semantics. They cannot build and store efficiently learned words according to L2 concept or semantic principle. This is the main reason why JMS learners fail to retrieve lexicon in the course of communication or examination.2. Considering word classes, the response patterns are shown to be slightly different by three different grades of learners. The organization of L2 mental lexicon for verb tends to be phonologically related, which is different from nouns and adjectives that are semantically meaningful related.Based on the research result mentioned above, the researcher proposed a cognitive processing model of L2 mental lexicon of Chinese JMS learners. This model illustrates to teachers how to improve their students'mental lexicon, so that their students could re-organize their mental lexicon effectively. Some teaching suggestions are also given to JMS English teachers accordingly.