The Influences Of The Representational Features Of The Chinese Vocational College Students’ L2Mental Lexicon On Their Listening Proficiency

With the fast development of psycholinguistics in the past years, mental lexicon has become an independent and eyes-attracted field. Channel (1988) argued that what mental lexicon is like composed of the access, the store and retrieval seems to be the main target issues. To explore how lexicons are connected and stored, especially in L2mental lexicon, can help the L2learners a lot in their vocabulary acquisition and cultivate related language proficiency, different models are proposed to exemplify the state or the structure of mental lexicon. If the store is disordered without certain organization or relations at all in the mind, to access and retrieve of words will be rather difficult in the language tasks. As English learners, the Chinese vocational college students possess their own strong characteristics:a. Most of the Chinese vocational college students are lively and energetic in practices, but they are likely to lack the interest of the theory learning;b. Most of them are over eighteen years old, who can be categorized as the adult second language learners and hold their own specific experience and methods about the English learning.c. Most of the Chinese vocational English learners spend much time on the vocabulary memorizing, while the vocabulary are still tend to be the bottleneck of their language acquisition.This paper tends to focus on a revised WA test, the listening test—spot dictation complemented with a questionnaire, through the testing results and analysis, the mental lexicon state of vocational college learners of English is investigated with further discussion. The main research questions are:What are the representational features or lexical preference of the Chinese vocational college students?What are the causes to lead to these features?To what extend do those features or preference influence their listening proficiency?Analyzed from the viewpoint of mental lexicon, some findings can be concluded as the below:(1) It is indicated that the state of mental lexicon of the Chinese vocational college students is far from perfect for lack of efficient semantic relations.(2)The major causes of the representational features include:firstly, some teachers can’t teach the vocabulary with proper methods by showing the related vocabulary knowledge such as the coordinate, antonym, synonymy, subordinate, context, collocation etc which are helpful to strengthen the semantic relations of the mental lexicon. Secondly, the Chinese vocational college students are likely to depend on the native language strongly without the awareness of building the mental lexicon, recite the words mechanically without the contextual understanding. And all those lead to the low listening proficiency.(3) Their mental lexicon does not play its role successfully in listening. And the messy and unstable organization of the mental lexicon might lead to the failure of the efficient retrieval and recognition during the listening tasks, and then result in the commonly low listening proficiency of the Chinese vocational college studentsIn sum, this study reveals that the vocational college English learners mostly fail to form an effective and efficient mental vocabulary. The inefficiency of lexicon acquisition and failure of language tasks, such as listening, partly result from the failure of mental lexicon. Therefore, in practice, it is safe to claim that with a well-established organization in mental lexicon and scientific language learning strategies, vocabulary acquisition can be promoted as well as listening proficiency.Finally, the theoretical and pedagogical meaning can be found, and Suggestions are proposed as well to improve L2mental lexicon and listening proficiency in both learning and teaching.