Sessions /
Mental Lexicons and Word Association: A Small-Scale Study #1166

Sat, Feb 20, 15:30-18:00 JST | Main Stage
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The question of how words are organized in language learners’ minds has become increasingly relevant as acknowledgement of the importance of vocabulary has increased. The concept of the mental lexicon attempts to model the connections between those words and to provide a map for how learners organize those associations. This presentation will look at common word relationships that comprise the mental lexicon using a small-scale word association task (WAT) as a method of graphing these connections in Japanese non-native speakers (NNSs) of English and native speakers. Also of interest to other graduate students, I will be discussing the process of preparing, conducting, coding and analyzing the WAT results and some pitfalls I hope to help you avoid, should you wish to run your own small-scale WAT.

*** Part of the Graduate Student Showcase; this presentation, itself, is ~25 minutes long. ***

Matthew French

Matthew French

Mihara Board of Education (Japan)
Matthew French is an EFL teacher with 7 years’ experience teaching English in Japan. He has taught primarily junior high and elementary school students in Japan as an ALT on the JET Programme. In class he is always looking for new ways to incorporate technology and music, while his research interests lie in using corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis, particularly political and news discourse, to reveal the power of words. He has recently submitted his dissertation for his master’s in TESOL through the University of Birmingham. Matthew currently works at the Mihara Board of Education in Hiroshima, Japan.