Abstract

This study examines low-intermediate to advanced ESL learners’ awareness of semantic prosody. Semantic prosody is a word/unit association that expresses an attitudinal meaning (described as favourable, neutral, unfavourable), which emerges from the word’s typical lexical environment. Sensitivity to and awareness of such associations is an indicator of the learners’ depth of vocabulary knowledge. The study investigates ESL learners’ implicit semantic prosody knowledge via high-frequency verbs with known semantic prosody tendencies. 123 ESL students, whose proficiency ranged from low-intermediate to advanced, took an elicitation and recognition test on 13 of these verbs. The test assessed the students’ performance on productive and receptive semantic prosody. The results of this study evidence the learners’ difficulty to produce semantic prosody in comparison to their ability to observe and recognise it. They confirm that semantic prosody awareness appears to need time to develop significantly, and such development does not always correlate with the learners’ proficiency level. Implications for incorporating semantic prosody in vocabulary teaching and developing learners’ pragmatic competence are provided.

摘要

这项研究探讨了中低阶到高级ESL学习者对语义韵律的认识。语义韵律是一个单词/单位的关联，表示一种态度的含义（被描述为有利，中立，不利），该含义源自该单词的典型词汇环境。对此类关联的敏感性和意识是学习者词汇知识深度的指标。该研究通过具有已知语义韵律倾向的高频动词来调查ESL学习者的隐性语义韵律知识。123名ESL学生的熟练程度从低中级到高级不等，他们对其中的13个动词进行了启发和识别测试。该测试评估了学生在生产性和接受性语义韵律方面的表现。这项研究的结果证明，与观察和识别语义韵律的能力相比，学习者难以产生语义韵律。他们证实，语义韵律意识似乎需要时间来显着发展，并且这种发展并不总是与学习者的熟练程度相关。提供了将语义韵律纳入词汇教学和发展学习者的语用能力的启示。