Assessing pedagogical approaches to foster the comprehension and retention of new L2 Spanish idioms

Clara Ureña Tormo,Julie Deconinck,Hélène Stengers

doi:10.14198/elua2021.35.15

Clara Ureña Tormo, Julie Deconinck + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.14198/elua2021.35.15

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Journal: ELUA	Publication Date: May 4, 2021
License type: CC BY 4.0

Affiliation: Vrije Universiteit Brussel, University of Alcalá

Abstract

This paper contains the experimental design of an empirical study that aims to assess the relative effectiveness of a number of pedagogical approaches designed to boost the comprehension of new L2 Spanish idioms and foster their retention. Building on a previous study (Ureña Tormo 2019), we suggest testing three pedagogical treatments, with two of them encouraging the participants to guess the meaning of the target idioms, before or after receiving information on their semantic motivation, and the other one focusing on meaning inference from context. The target units are 15 Spanish idioms related to a range of topics and the participants are 90 English speaking learners of Spanish. The results that we obtain will allow for the assessment of the effectiveness of each pedagogical proposal, and will be compared to the ones obtained in Ureña Tormo (2019).

Highlights

Much of the recent research on Foreign Language Pedagogy has been dedicated to the learning and teaching of formulaic language (Boers, 2011)
This paper aims to suggest pedagogical approaches based on the semantic motivation of idioms on the one hand, and contextual clues on the other hand, in a bid to 1) increase the likelihood of learners guessing or inferring the meaning of new L2 idioms correctly; 2) reducing the risk of error effects, and 3) revealing which approach is most effective in terms of idiom retention
This paper aims to investigate if a pedagogical approach based on the semantic motivation of the target idioms is more effective for the retention of their meaning than a pedagogical approach based on inference from context

Summary

Introduction

Much of the recent research on Foreign Language Pedagogy has been dedicated to the learning and teaching of formulaic language (Boers, 2011). If effective language processing parses language as chunks, mastery of formulaic sequences and multi-word units will be beneficial to L2 learners (Skehan, 1998; Wray, 2002). Research has shown that advanced language proficiency and effective communication skills are informed by the learner’s knowledge of patterns of word combinations and prefabricated units (Boers & Lindstromberg, 2008; Ellis, 2008). We suggest three pedagogical approaches for the learning of Spanish idioms to be tested in an empirical study with L2 Spanish learners. These teaching approaches contain tasks that involve meaning guessing ‒with or without prior knowledge of the semantic motivation of idioms‒ and meaning inference from context

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Conclusion