“字彙關鍵字聯想法”對自動化第二語字彙訊息處理系統的發展探討

The profound cultural resources and economic growth in the Chinese-speaking countries have attracted more than 40 million second language (L2) learners of Chinese around the world. This vigorous learning interest, however, is severely underserved by a lack of systematic research on L2 Chinese teaching and learning. This paper reviews and discusses findings of relevant cognitive research on the development of the bilingual mental lexicon with the hope that L2 Chinese teachers will be inspired to learn more about the bilingual mental lexicon from a developmental perspective and to reflect on their current vocabulary teaching practice. Considered in light of how the bilingual lexical architecture evolves, Keyword-Semantic Mnemonics (KSM)—a technique frequently used in second- or foreign-language vocabulary teaching—is reviewed and discussed in hope of providing pedagogical guidelines for fostering an optimal lexical activation network when teaching novel L2 vocabulary. Furthermore, considering that activation and inhibition (control) mechanisms are both key to achieving an efficient bilingual lexical architecture for real-time language processing tasks, this paper draws on relevant lexical (processing) research and proposes pedagogical steps that may help foster such a control mechanism in the practice of KSM instruction. It is argued that the absence of a lexical control mechanism may lead to lexical fossilization and have a negative impact on lexical retention. Finally, this paper proposes an alternative assessment measure of KSM instruction based on insights obtained from Dynamic System Theory (DST)—a popular theoretical construct recently used to account for various aspects of language acquisition.