“What do you know about semantic prosody?” Teaching and evaluating implicit knowledge of English with corpus-assisted methods

ABSTRACT

The meaning of words can be influenced by their co-occurrences. Semantic prosody (SP) is attitudinal and evaluative meaning inferred from the habitual lexical environment of a word in a corpus. By introducing SP in an English teaching classroom, teachers can reveal more implicit knowledge about language usage and assist students in reaching sufficient English language competence. This paper offers a detailed study of semantic prosody and suggests an approach to vocabulary instruction by making use of research results obtained in a native English corpus. On the basis of corpus-assisted methods, this study documents a series of pedagogical interventions such as SP instruction, tests, surveys and interviews, which are centred on using SP in synonym differentiation. The pedagogical implications are to raise the awareness of semantic prosody among English learners and encourage them to explore more idiomatic and natural use of English vocabulary by studying collocational meaning in corpora.

KEYWORDS:

• Semantic prosody
• corpus
• English language teaching
• vocabulary instruction
• synonym differentiation

Acknowledgments

I would like to express my great thanks to Professor John Corbett, who taught me corpus linguistics during my MA study. I am very grateful to Dr. John Hodgson for his patience and generosity in handling this paper and to the anonymous reviewers who have offered many insightful comments on early versions of the paper. I owe a debt of gratitude to Sijing Zhou for her wonderful suggestions, to the mathematician Charlie Min for his technical support and to my students who have participated in the tests, surveys and interviews. This paper is supported by Huaqiao University Start-up Research Fund [Grant Number: 18SKBS106] and the Social Science Fund of Fujian Province [Grant Number FJ2019B065].

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. The Intensive Reading Course has the highest number of teaching hours compared with other courses and it aims to train comprehensive skills in English learning. It is called “Integrated English Course” in many universities in China; in the author’s institution, the course’s name has been changed to this new name since 2020.

2. The students have roughly similar linguistic and cultural backgrounds and most of them come from Mainland China. This paper compares test scores of 29 mainland Chinese students who participated in both Test A and Test B.

Additional information

Funding

This paper is supported by Huaqiao University Start-up Research Fund [Grant Number: 18SKBS106] and the Social Science Fund of Fujian Province [Grant Number FJ2019B065]

Notes on contributors

Hong Zhang

Hong Zhang is an Associate Professor at the College of Foreign Languages, Huaqiao University, China. She obtained MA and PhD degrees from University of Macau. Her research interests include semiotic landscapes, multimodality, corpus linguistics and English language teaching, etc. She has taught courses such as Linguistic Landscape and Intensive Reading and has published several papers in International Journal of Bilingualism, Language and Intercultural Communication, and Visual Communication.