An Empirical Research On The Application Of Association Strategy In Grade Nine English Vocabulary Revision Based On Mental Lexicon

Vocabulary revision is an integral part of the whole process of English vocabulary learning,which helps master vocabulary systematically and helps transfer from passive acceptance to active learning.Grade Nine students have heavy burden of learning.They spare time to memorize words,but the efficiency is rather low.Therefore,appropriate vocabulary learning strategies are urgently required to improve the vocabulary revision efficiency.The introduction to the theory of mental lexicon provides a direction to solve this problem.Mental lexicon is a study on how words are organized in the mind,stored into memory and extracted to use,which is actually about the words stored in learners’ long-term memory in an interconnected system.However,due to different frequency of words being extracted and applied,some mental words are not perceived.Vocabulary association strategy is also a kind of learning method related to psychology.When students want to know a word,they associate its phonetic,morphological,semantic and contextual attributes.So people often use association to stimulate their mental lexicon and create network diagrams to establish the connections between words.At present,there are many researches on mental lexicon or association strategy,but few on the combination of the two in vocabulary revision.In view of the current gap in vocabulary teaching research,the author applied four types of association strategies and three processes of mental lexicon to carry out a four-month experiment in a Zhenjiang junior middle school in Jiangsu Province.The experimental classadopts the word association strategy to teach,while the Control Class remains the traditional vocabulary teaching method.Through the quantitative or qualitative analysis of tests,questionnaires and interviews,the influence of word association strategy on the Grade Nine students’ vocabulary revision is proved.The research is devoted to solving the following three research questions:1.How can the four association strategies help Grade Nine students activate and review their mental lexicon?2.What effects does word association strategy have on Grade Nine students’ memory process?3.To what extent can word association strategy have effects on Grade nine students’ English words extraction and application ability?Through the empirical research,this paper draws some conclusions.Word association strategy can not only help Grade Nine students review more words in the form of phonetic association,morphological association,semantic association or contextual association,but also have positive effects on students’ both short-term memory and long-term memory.The vocabulary size of students can be expanded in order that they can extract and apply mental lexicon more effectively;meanwhile,their interest and confidence in learning English are enhanced greatly.