The Impact of L1/L2-Based Explicit Output Task Instruction on Iranian EFL Learners’ Semantic Prosody Learning

Abstract

Most of the studies on semantic prosody have mainly focused on the recognition of positive, negative, or neutral load of the meaning inferred from the node and its co-occurrences from corpus-based perspectives. However, this study aimed at delving into the teaching and learning aspect of semantic prosodies within the classroom setting. To this end, 76 Iranian undergraduate university students majoring in English translation were randomly selected. Receptive Semantic Prosody Test (RSPT) was administered as a pre-test to assess the students’ initial knowledge of the semantic prosodies. Then, the students were assigned to three groups: two experimental (L1-based and L2-based) and one control group. The experimental groups went through a seven-week instructional period and received explicit output task instruction on semantic prosodies for 30 minutes at the end of their regular class hour, while the control group was exposed to the same output tasks to complete based on the presented contextual clues only, and no such explicit instruction was provided to them. Finally, RSPT was administered again to see how effective the output task instruction had been with regard to the semantic prosody learning. The comparison of the two approaches to learning semantic prosody demonstrated that L1-based instruction was more effective, and EFL learners were generally more receptive to L1-based output task instruction. The study further implies that both L2 teachers and learners can ill afford to turn a blind eye to the important and undeniable role L1 use plays in learning L2 vocabularies in general and semantic prosodies in particular.