| As one of the basic skills of language development, reading is the most convenient and efficient way of language input and cultural extension for Chinese L2learners. Through years of teaching experience, the researcher finds out that accurate word decoding is always a major problem that might influence students’ reading comprehension. However, facilitating L2learners to establish a sound lexicon network has been neglected in most classroom activities. The thesis intends to probe the interactive relationships between reading proficiency and the construction of L2mental lexicon and proceed to explore ways to apply these findings to college English teaching, especially to the task of reading comprehension.The present study is designed to find out the organizational patterns of mental lexicon from Chinese L2learners with different reading proficiency via a carefully selected word association test and a word knowledge scale test. By comparison of the results within groups and results from previous studies, it is found out that the link pattern of Chinese L2learners is both semantic and non-semantic. Different from native speaker, whose link pattern is dominantly semantic, the large proportion of non-semantic responses is mainly due to the incompleteness of mental lexicon and years of classroom instruction where teachers get used to teach words of similar sound and forms together but neglect the semantic connections among words. With the increase of L2learners’language proficiency, more semantic responses are produced, whereas the impact of non-semantic connections is still strong. The findings indicate that effective reading could help to reorganize and complete L2mental lexicon network and on the other hand, a strong connected lexicon network will improve the ability of reading comprehension. In the end, suggestions are given to reform English teaching of reading and words at college level. |
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