LEXICON TEACHING AND READING COMPREHENSION

This paper examines the problem of inefficient reading comprehension with non-English major college students, and tackles the problem with the teaching method of integrating grammatical information into lexicon teaching. The underlying idea is that working memory, whose core characteristic is its severely limited capacity, is of vital importance to language comprehension, and that the process of lexical retrieval from the permanent memory is much easier than the process of working our way through a syntactic structure. Therefore a hypothesis is formulated that to purposely increase the readers' awareness of storing grammatical information in the lexicon will bring about an increased speed, hence improved reading performance. Through careful design of the experiment, the writer proves that this method can lighten the burden on working memory, which consequently brings about significantly improved reading comprehension.

The Effectiveness of the Bilingualized Dictionary:A Psycholinguistic Point of View

通过对EFL学习者的心理表征与理解过程的分析,文章对四类英语学习词典中的释义部分和例证的处理方式进行了对比。结论是释义的双解处理方式有助于EFL学习者建立词名和概念之间的联系,从而充分理解词义;例证的双语处理方式有助于EFL学习者理解具体上下文中的词义变化以及对常用搭配、习语等作为词块进行储存,从而提高了学习效率。因此,双解本综合了四类词典在这两方面的优势,比其他三类词典更适合EFL学习者使用。