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Abstract
This study examines low-intermediate to advanced ESL learners’ awareness of semantic prosody. Semantic prosody is a word/unit association that expresses an attitudinal meaning (described as favourable, neutral, unfavourable), which emerges from the word’s typical lexical environment. Sensitivity to and awareness of such associations is an indicator of the learners’ depth of vocabulary knowledge. The study investigates ESL learners’ implicit semantic prosody knowledge via high-frequency verbs with known semantic prosody tendencies. 123 ESL students, whose proficiency ranged from low-intermediate to advanced, took an elicitation and recognition test on 13 of these verbs. The test assessed the students’ performance on productive and receptive semantic prosody. The results of this study evidence the learners’ difficulty to produce semantic prosody in comparison to their ability to observe and recognise it. They confirm that semantic prosody awareness appears to need time to develop significantly, and such development does not always correlate with the learners’ proficiency level. Implications for incorporating semantic prosody in vocabulary teaching and developing learners’ pragmatic competence are provided.
Acknowledgements
We would like to express our sincere gratitude to Aziz Yuldashev for his guidance and insightful feedback on the semantic prosody test design, and to Lindsey Sharp at the UIUC ATLAS-TLT for her tremendous help with the online test development. Many thanks go to UIUC faculty and students who participated in this study. We are equally grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive and insightful comments on an earlier version of this paper.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Silvana Dushku
Silvana Dushku worked as Senior Lecturer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Intensive English Institute for over a decade. She is currently the Director of the Community Language Program and TESOL Certificate Program at Teachers College, Columbia University.
Youngshil Paek
Youngshil Paek is a Visiting Research Specialist at the University of Illinois I-STEM Education Initiative, in Champaign, Illinois.