An Application Of Mental Lexicon Theory To English Vocabulary Teaching In Junior High School

Language competence constitutes the basic element of the English quality education.The effectiveness of the English vocabulary teaching and the students’ ability to acquire vocabulary determines the effects of the English teaching.So in order to facilitate students’ vocabulary acquisition,from the perspective of cognitive psychology,this study attempts to take the Mental Lexicon Theory as the theoretical support to explore a new vocabulary teaching mode in junior high schools.In recent years,many researchers and scholars have introduced some useful and creative methods to guide the English vocabulary teaching mainly from theoretical perspectives,but the application of the relevant theory and methods is relatively limited.What’s more,these researches mainly focus on college students.According to the Mental Lexicon Theory and its related researches,the author proposed a new mode to guide students to master the basic knowledge of phonology and morphology,adopt the word association,create situational contexts and then perform unconsciously in the process of reviewing vocabulary.In this way,students will be able to unconsciously recognize the association between words which will definitely help them retrieve the new words from memory more quickly and effectively even after a long time.The author adopted the empirical research method and applied the mental lexicon related theory in the daily English teaching procedures.The subjects of this experiment are the 60 students from two classes of a middle school in Kunshan.The results show that before the experiment,there is no significant difference between the two classes.During the experiment,the traditional vocabulary teaching method was used in the control class and the mental-lexicon-based vocabulary teaching model was used in the experimental class.After the experiment,the two classes were tested.In addition,after the experiment,three students from the experimental class and the control class were interviewed to further understand the problem-solving process of students at all levels.The teaching experiment lasts for about three months.All these tests and investigation are aimed to deal with the following three research questions:(1)What effects does the mental-lexicon-based vocabulary teaching model have on students’ English vocabulary acquisition?(2)Why does the mental-lexicon-based vocabulary teaching model influence students’ English vocabulary acquisition?(3)How can English teachers apply this new vocabulary teaching model in daily vocabulary teaching?After the experiment,the data is collected and statistically analyzed.To some degree,the results are clear and objective.Firstly,this new vocabulary teaching model can improve students’ vocabulary acquisition in that it has phonological priming effects,semantic priming effects and context priming effects.As for the semantic priming effect,both the horizontal combination and the vertical polymerization increased,but the vertical polymerization increased enormously.Secondly,from the analysis of results and the interviews with six students,we can find that it enables students to gradually and unintentionally recognize the importance of the words’ storage and retrieval by paying attention to the phonological and morphological properties of the word,its semantic related words and its contextualized usage.And those who are at the intermediate and advanced level of English can adapt to the new vocabulary teaching model better.Thirdly,when applying this teaching mode,teachers should pay attention to four elements: strengthening the phonological teaching of the vocabulary,explaining new vocabulary in simple and familiar English,demonstrating semantic related vocabulary,and reviewing new words in contexts.The effectiveness of the application of the mental lexicon theory on the English vocabulary teaching and learning in junior high school is proved not only in theory,but also through practice.In the end,the author put forward some pedagogical implications.To conclude,though the results of this research are limited,I hope it can have some positive significance to the improvement of English vocabulary teaching effectiveness.