The Development of Lexical Semantic Autonomy of English Majors

Abstract

This study investigates the development of lexical semantic autonomy by a semantic relatedness test on the part of 200 English majors from Year one through Year four in a university in Shandong Province. Despite the obvious development of their receptive vocabulary size, the subjects at the four learning stages have not achieved the lexical semantic autonomy, confirming the view that L1 semantic involvement in L2 word processing is a long and constant state of L2 lexical development. Explicit vocabulary teaching complemented by data-driven learning can be adopted to trigger the semantic restructuring, overcome semantic fossilization, and promote the development of lexical semantic autonomy in L2 vocabulary acquisition.