A Study On Strategies Of College English Vocabulary Teaching Based On L2 Mental Lexicon

Vocabulary is the cornerstone of a language. The significance of vocabulary learning in learning a foreign language is obvious. College students have spent much time on English vocabulary learning, but they get undesired results.Mental lexicon provides another new research perspective for L2/ FL teaching and learning. Through exploring the organization of L2 mental lexicon, the real learning situation for L2 learners can be clearly seen by teachers so that they can adopt correct English teaching strategies. It is usually agreed that the mental lexicon of English native speakers is well-organized and it is the good-organization that makes rapid and easy retrieval of words possible. The organization of L1 mental lexicon is of strong semantic links but weak phonological links. However, after approximately ten years English study, the organization of L2 mental lexicon of college students is not the case.In order to explore college students'L2 mental lexicon, a word association test is made among 110 subjects from non-English major. By analyzing the responses quantitatively and qualitatively and comparing them with the data from the Edinburgh Associative Thesaurus, this study shows that the organization of mental lexicon of college students and native speakers is quite different from each other. The organization feature of college students'L2 mental lexicon is of strong phonological links but weak semantic links. More specifically, there is strong semantic interference from mother tongue, and English knowledge is mixed with Chinese culture. Besides, misidentification toward some low frequency words also exists. Based on the findings, the author analyzes the reasons preventing students from English acquisition in traditional English teaching and puts forward some useful teaching strategies, such as teaching students some knowledge on mental lexicon, words in specific culture, and teaching them how to use dictionary correctly and build word network, and students should also be guided to learn new words in context and to reorganize L2 mental lexicon.