College English Lexical Learning Dependent on Context

Lexical learning is an essential component of college English learning. The traditional grammar-based learning model of vocabulary focuses on developing the linguistic competence rather than the pragmatic competence, which can not meet the need of college English learning in the new educational situation. The meaning of a word is generated in specific language environment and a single word is meaningless, so context plays a crucial role in the word meaning determination. Context roughly falls into linguistic context and non-linguistic context, with the former consisting of lexical context, verbal context and grammatical context and the latter of situational context and cultural context. In the process of college English learning, these five contexts are expected to be applied to differentiate polysemy, to eliminate ambiguities and to indicate referents.