Should We Teach Semantic Prosody Awareness?

Abstract

While considerable attention has been paid to collocation, and the development of the collocational competence of L2 learners in recent years, very little has been said about a related concept in teaching journals, namely semantic prosody, and L2 learner awareness of this phenomenon. In this paper the concept of semantic prosody is introduced, and then discussed, before an experiment is reported investigating the semantic prosody awareness of three different sets of participants (university undergraduate Arab students, Arab English teachers, and native speaker (NS) English teachers) for seven lexical items for which specific semantic prosody claims have been made by corpus linguists. The results show that the data from the NS Group (when considered as a group) concurred with corpus observed semantic prosody tendencies for all seven items, but for the other two sets of participants the results were mixed regarding agreement. It would appear that for some items non-native users of English of different language levels appreciated the typical semantic prosody. For other items this was clearly not the case, and it appears that semantic prosody awareness can be incremental, or may not actually develop. Given the mixed data, it is suggested that explicit instruction about semantic prosody in the classroom may be of some value to learners.