Teaching Semantic Prosody of English Verbs through the DDL Approach and its Effect on Learners' Vocabulary Choice Appropriateness in a Persian EFL Context

Niloofar Mansoory,Mohsen Jafarpour

doi:10.7575/aiac.alls.v.5n.2p.149

Abstract

This study examined teaching SP of English verbs through the data-driven learning (DDL) approach and its effect on learners' vocabulary choice appropriateness in the Persian English foreign language (EFL) context. In the present study, two male intact classes were selected. One of these two classes was randomly selected as a treatment group and another one as a control group. The treatment group was provided with SP instruction through the DDL approach. The control group was exposed to SP as well, but traditionally and not through a DDL approach. The corpora used in the DDL approach were the Brown corpus and British National Corpus (BNC). Pretests and posttests of vocabulary choice appropriateness were administered and a repeated-measures ANOVA was used to compare means of test scores within and between subjects. The results indicated that SP instruction through DDL was significantly an effective approach to improve EFL learners' vocabulary choice appropriateness.

Highlights

Nowadays, it is observed that vocabulary teaching and learning has significant effect on communication and acquisition (Richards & Renandya, 2002)
The hypothesis, that teaching SP of English verbs through the data-driven learning (DDL) approach has a significant effect on the improvement of English foreign language (EFL) learners' vocabulary choice appropriateness, is confirmed and accepted
Test results showed that participants, in the treatment group, improved their scores in the posttest by learning SP of English verbs through the DDL approach

Summary

Introduction

It is observed that vocabulary teaching and learning has significant effect on communication and acquisition (Richards & Renandya, 2002). In many cases, traditional teaching methods do not bring about native-like competence of English vocabulary so complements are necessary. Partington (2004) argues that there are two forms of evaluative meaning: One form of evaluative meaning is connotative meaning which is obvious and in-build, for example items such as excessive and flabby have negative connotative meaning which are clear to language users. Another form of evaluative meaning is SP which is spread over a unit of language and goes well beyond the single word and is much less evident to language users

Results

Discussion

Conclusion