Semantic Implicit Learning in Acquisition of L2 English

• Authors: Paciorek Albertyna
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Communicative approaches to language teaching assume the learning occurs as a by-product of communication. The present study explores this issue experimentally, examining the phenomenon of implicit learning among Polish learners of English. The study focuses on learning to apply new English words in semantically appropriate contexts. Whether the learning is implicit or not is determined using subjective measures of awareness (following Z. Dienes/ R. Scott 2005). Polish learners of English read English sentences containing 4 target words. Next they completed an unexpected test on new sentences in which they were asked to indicate whether target words were used correctly and to provide confidence and source judgements to each answer, as subjective measures of awareness (guess/ intuition responses taken as reflecting implicit knowledge). The experimental group was compared with a control group who did not receive training. Findings include significantly above chance performance on guess/ intuition responses in both groups, with an advantage in the experimental group that approached significance, suggesting that this group may have indeed implicitly learnt about the applicable semantic contexts for the newly learnt words. The learning effect did not extend to appropriate but semantically different contexts to the ones participants saw in training, suggesting implicit learning is restricted in its scope. Educators must therefore ensure to provide representative sentence samples when introducing new words and may need to explicitly point out any contexts which semantically diverge from the ones the students were exposed to.

Keywords

EN

Implicit learning; implicit knowledge; vocabulary learning; collocation; semantics; meaning; context

• Publisher: Instytut Komunikacji Specjalistycznej i Interkulturowej
• Journal: Lingwistyka Stosowana / Applied Linguistics / Angewandte Linguistik
• Year: 2015
• Issue: 14
• Pages: 113-123

Dates

published

2015

Contributors

author

Paciorek Albertyna

• Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny im. Komisji Edukacji Narodowej w Krakowie

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Identifiers

ISSN

2080-4814