A Study On The L2Mental Lexicon Organization Of Senior Middle School English Learners

With the improvements of research in vocabulary teaching and learning in the L2, mental lexicon research in recent decades has become an independent and popular field in psycholinguistics. Up to now, numerous scholars at home and abroad have made great strides in analyzing L2mental lexicon. However, most of the researchers focus their attention on the tertiary learners. Similar research has rarely been found concerning the state of L2mental lexicon of students of the secondary level, especially of Chinese Senior Middle School (SMS) learners.Against such a research background, the present study aims to explore these SMS learners’L2mental lexicon organization by utilizing a word association test to provide some implications for vocabulary teaching and acquisition. For this purpose, this study seeks to answer three research questions:(1) What is the overall distribution of L2mental lexicon organization of Senior Middle School learners across three grades?(2) What are the differences of L2mental lexicon organization across three grades?(3) What are the typical characteristics of L2mental lexicon organization across three grades?The theoretical framework adopted in this study was based on the related theories of mental lexicon and L2vocabulary acquisition. This study employed the mixed design of quantitative and qualitative approaches. For the quantitative part, the instruments were word association tests and questionnaire. The subjects are90Chinese senior middle school students, which were randomly chosen from Xinhua Senior Middle School in Yangzhou,30from each of three grades. Five learners of each grade, which are not the subjects for word association test, were randomly chosen to be the participants in the pilot study. Finally,32English words were chosen to be stimulus words in the subsequent experiment. Based on the former research experience, the response words of the word association test were classified into five response types-paradigmatic, syntagmatic, encyclopedic, phonological and no responses. Paradigmatic, syntagmatic, encyclopedic responses can also be classified into semantic responses. For the qualitative part, six words were selected from the stimulus words of word association test for the qualitative analysis in the semantic and phonological relationship. Six words were consisted of two nouns, two verbs, and two adjectives.The data analysis generates the following results:1. For the SMS learners across three grades, semantic links play a predominant role in L2mental lexicon organization. Paradigmatic responses have the highest proportion (47.20%) of all the responses. The order of the proportion of the five response types is paradigmatic responses>phonological responses>syntagmatic responses>other responses>encyclopedic responses.2. Concerning the five response types of paradigmatic, syntagmatic, encyclopedic, phonological, and other responses, as the grade increases, the responses of SMS learners tend to show an increasing proportion in paradigmatic and phonological responses and decreasing proportion in encyclopedic and other responses, though with fluctuations. The proportion of syntagmatic responses doesn’t differ much for learners of each grade.3. Some typical characteristics of L2mental lexicon organization of the SMS learners have been found. The most important characteristic shows that the learners can’t efficiently retain vocabulary according to L2concept system; in contrast, the mental lexicon links are mostly based on L1concept and semantic, which leads to a failure to retrieve the learned L2mental lexicon for the SMS learners.The major findings generated from this study may have some pedagogical implications:From the teachers’perspective, firstly, the teachers should find every opportunity for the students to encounter words in meaningful contexts, not merely on the words list. Secondly, the teachers should adopt flexible ways to teach vocabulary thereby lessening the interference of L1in the process of vocabulary teaching. Thirdly, the teachers should help the learners make some repeated reinforcement of the words, particularly the ones that are too long or difficult for the learners to remember at the very beginning. From the perspective of the learners, firstly, a good habit for the learners is to read extensively every day, thereby effectively enabling them to learn new words and reinforce recently learned words. Secondly, the learners can be encouraged to associate the new words with known information as much as they can. Thirdly, L2learners need to make conscious effort to integrate the word family members into one-unit storage.