When does assonance make L2 lexical phrases memorable?

Among the challenges that second language learners face is that of acquiring a large num-ber of lexical phrases such as collocations and idiomatic expressions (e.g. Pawley & Syder, 1983; Willis, 1990; Nattinger & DeCarrico, 1992; Lewis, 1993). There is evidence that post-childhood learners master this dimension of L2 vocabulary very slowly (e.g. Li & Schmitt, 2010; Laufer & Waldman, 2011). In recent years, researchers have tested diverse proposals about how learners can be helped to acquire L2 phrases (see Boers & Lind-stromberg, 2012). The factor we explore in the present article, however, is a phonological feature that may make word combinations relatively noticeable and easy to acquire, namely, assonance

Re-telling a story in a second language: How well do adult learners mine an input text for multiword expressions?

Adult second language (L2) learners have often been found to produce discourse that manifests limited and non-native-like use of multiword expressions. One explanation for this is that adult L2 learners are relatively unsuccessful (in the absence of pedagogic intervention) at transferring multiword expressions from input texts to their own output resources. The present article reports an exploratory study where ESL learners were asked to re-tell a short story which they had read and listened to twice. The learners’ re-tells were subsequently examined for the extent to which they recycled multiword expressions from the original story. To gauge the influence of the input text on these learners’ renderings of the story, a control group was asked to tell the story based exclusively on a series of pictures. The results of the experiment suggest that multiword expressions were recycled from the input text to some extent, but this stayed very marginal in real terms, especially in comparison with the recycling of single words. Moreover, when learners did borrow expressions from the input text, their reproductions were often non-target-like

Teaching and Learning Collocation in Adult Second and Foreign Language Learning

Perhaps the greatest challenge to creating a research timeline on teaching and learning collocation is deciding how wide to cast the net in the search for relevant publications. For one thing, the term collocation does not have the same meaning for all (applied) linguists and practitioners (Barfield & Gyllstad 2009: 3–7). For another, items that are labelled as collocations in one study may be called something else in another study (Wray 2000: 465)

Influential Factors in Lexical Richness of Young Heritage Speakers’ Family Language

Abstract Aims and objectives: This study investigates the extent to which young heritage speakers’ oral narratives in L1 differ from monolinguals’ narratives with regard to lexical richness (lexical diversity and lexical sophistication). It also explores which demographic factors (age, age at emigration and length of emigration) and/or sociolinguistic factors (frequency of heritage language use and parental attitudes towards heritage language maintenance) account for the differences. Data and analysis: The participants were a group of 25 young speakers of Persian as a heritage language, who were either born in or emigrated to New Zealand, and a group of 25 monolingual counterparts in Iran. Demographic information about the heritage speakers as well as information about parental attitude and practices regarding heritage language acquisition and maintenance were collected through semi-structured interviews with their parents. A film-retelling task was used to elicit the oral narratives, and these were analyzed for lexical diversity (by means of the Measure of Textual Lexical Diversity—MTLD) and for lexical sophistication (by counting the incidence of low-frequency words). Findings and conclusion: As expected, the monolinguals’ narratives tended to manifest greater lexical richness than the heritage speakers’, especially according to the measure of lexical sophistication. Against expectation, frequency of heritage language use and parental attitude towards heritage language acquisition and maintenance were not found to be significant predictors of the young heritage speakers’ results. For the heritage speakers who were born in New Zealand, the results were predicted best by their age, while for those who arrived in New Zealand at a later age, the best predictors were both their age and how old they were at the time of emigration. This suggests that the demographic factors overrode the potential influence of the sociolinguistic variables examined. Originality: This study sheds light on (factors that contribute to) young heritage speakers’ L1 lexical competence, a topic which has hitherto been under-investigated. Significance and implications: A major implication of this study is showing the association of age and heritage speakers’ lexical richness. Although the statistical analyses did not show the effect of sociolinguistic variables, this finding indirectly supports the effect of parental input on heritage language proficiency in young bilinguals. Limitations: Limitations of the study include the relatively small number of participants, the use of only one task to elicit speech samples, and the reliance on parents’ self-reported family language habits

Gauging the Association of EFL Learners’ Writing Proficiency and their Use of Metaphorical Language

This study examines whether higher-proficiency learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) produce expository writing that exhibits a greater density of metaphorically used words and expressions than what is found in texts produced by lower-proficiency peers. A comparison was made between essays written by 257 undergraduate English majors at three different year levels at a university in Viet Nam. The proportion of metaphorical language making up these essays was indeed found to be positively related to the students’ year levels and also to the grades awarded to the essays by independent assessors. A closer inspection of the data revealed that this positive association between proficiency and quantity of metaphorical expressions held true exclusively for grammatically correct instances of metaphorical language. The findings suggests that learners stand to gain considerably—in terms of perceived writing proficiency—from using words in their non-basic senses, as long as this use is also grammatically target-like

Helping learners engage with L2 words: the form-meaning fit

The pace at which new words are acquired is influenced by the degree of engagement with them on the part of the learner. Insights from Cognitive Linguistics into the non-arbitrary aspects of vocabulary can be turned into stimuli for such engagement. The majority of Cognitive Linguists’ proposals for vocabulary teaching aim at helping learners appreciate the way a single word form can develop different meanings. This, however, presupposes knowledge of the ‘basic’ meaning of that word. We report an experiment in which learners under an experimental treatment were stimulated to consider the possibility that the form-meaning link in target words might not be fully arbitrary. The mnemonic effect of this task-induced engagement was assessed in relation to comparison treatments in immediate and delayed post-tests measuring both receptive and productive knowledge. Results show that simply prompting learners to evaluate the form-meaning match of words can foster vocabulary acquisition, although not all target words lends themselves equally well to this type of engagement

Exploring learners’ understanding of technical vocabulary in Traditional Chinese Medicine

This study explores English for specific purposes learners’ understanding of technical words in a previously-developed technical word list in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). The principal aim was to estimate what kind of technical terms pose problems to TCM learners and might therefore merit special attention in instruction. Of particular interest was the question whether there is a divergence in the understanding of technical vocabulary in TCM between Chinese and Western background learners. To achieve these aims, a combination of word association tasks and retrospective interviews was implemented with 11 Chinese and 10 Western background TCM learners. The data showed that both Chinese and Western learners encountered certain difficulties in understanding technical vocabulary in their study. However, their sources of difficulty were different. Comparisons of typical word associations between Chinese and Western learners indicated that there was a degree of divergence in the way these two participant groups understood TCM terms

Further Evidence of the Comparative Memorability of Alliterative Expressions in Second Language Learning

Previous research has furnished evidence that alliterative expressions (e.g. a slippery slope) are comparatively memorable for second language learners, at least when these expressions are attended to as decontextualized items (Lindstromberg and Boers, 2008a; Boers et al., 2012). The present study investigates whether alliteration renders lexical phrases comparatively memorable also when these phrases are encountered in texts read primarily with a focus on content. Fifty-four EFL students read a text adapted so as to include five instances of 12 idiomatic expressions. The results of surprise post-tests suggest that the alliterative phrases among these target expressions left significantly stronger memory traces than the non-alliterative ones, especially regarding the form or composition of the phrases