An Empirical Study Of L2 Mental Lexicon Of Chinese Sms Learners And Its Implication To English Vocabulary Teaching

Mental lexicon is defined as internal lexicon, in which all the knowledge related to the word is represented. Exploration of how lexicons are related and stored especially in L2 mental lexicon can help improve vocabulary acquisition. Up to date, many Chinese scholars have attempted to reveal the nature of Chinese English learners'mental lexicon, with great progress made manifest in this field. The previous researchers have investigated the Chinese L2 mental lexicon at the advanced level, ignoring the state of L2 mental lexicon of students of the secondary level, particularly, and junior middle school (SMS). One of the first problems the SMS L2 learners will encounters is how to memorize a massive amount of foreign words. Besides, as for SMS learners, they wonder what effective ways there are for them to raise their vocabulary in both quality and quantity. In the view of the problems above, it is necessary to explore these Chinese SMS learners'L2 mental lexicon connections by employing word association test to provide some clues for better vocabulary teaching.In the research, 89 senior middle school students were randomly chosen from Grade Two in Suzhou No.1 Senior Middle School. They were students from both Science and Art Classes (for college orientation). The instrument was word association test.