Meaning Construction Of Mental Lexiconin SLA Through Multimodal Teaching: From Perspective Of Social And Cognitive Theory

The famous linguist Wilkins(1972) says that without learning grammar, interlocutors are still able to communicate with each other; without learning lexicons, they cannot carry out communication. Second language lexicons are of paramount importance to second language learners. The improvement of language skills is based on lexicon accumulation. Lexical learning is not an easy task for most second language learners. Among dimensional lexicon knowledge, lexicon meaning is difficult for learners to grasp.Socialcultural theories mainly focus on research of development of human being’s advanced mental functions. According to SCT, language is not made up of abstract sentences which are isolated from social interaction, but belongs to social phenomena and exists in social interaction. The main content of SCT consists of mediation, regulation, internalization, zone of proximal development, scaffolding, private speech/ inner speech, activity theory and genetic method. Mental lexicon as an internal mechanism cannot be developed without exterior social environment. From the perspective of SCT, this research will elucidate mediation of multimodal teaching, as a non-language social artifact, toward acquisition of second language mental lexicon meanings. It will distill main theoretical findings of two schools to verify that the multimodal teaching can promote meaning construction of mental lexicons in cultural context.This research lasted for half a year. The subjects were chosen from Grade Eight students of Cuozhen County located in the east of Anhui Province. At first, 70 subjects(35subjetcs from the experimental class; 35 students form the control class) were chosen according to test results of Grade Seven English terminal examination. Then, the pre-test was carried out at the beginning of Autumn Semester,2014 so as to get data before the teaching experiment, after which the teaching experiment was conducted. The multimodal English lexical teaching was carried out in the experimental class; the traditional English lexical teaching was conducted in the control class. At the end of the semester, the post-test was conducted in two classes. The data collected during the examinations was all entered into SPSS19.0 to proceed with the quantitative analysis. They were first analyzed through Independent Samples T Test, then through Paired Samples T-test. Questionnaires were handed out to the subjects in the experimental class after the teaching experiment to find out their attitudes towards the multimodal teaching as well as the traditional teaching.The experimental results show that there is an apparent relevance between the teaching pattern and meaning acquisition of second language mental lexicon and that the effect of multimodal teaching on the meaning acquisition is apparently better than that of the traditional English teaching. The results of questionnaires indicate that the multimodal teaching can benefit second language mental lexicon meaning acquisition, arouse students’ English learning interests, improve their ability to use language, expand their vocabulary size and background knowledge. The students hold positive attitudes towards the multimodal teaching in assistance of the teacher.This research enriches practical experience about multimodal English lexical teaching and mental lexicon research. The integration of theories of cognitive school and social school also provides a brand new research perspective for SLA as well as English teaching.