Semantic Category Effects in L2 Vocabulary Learning: A MOGUL Perspective

柴斯科(Roman Chepyshko)

指導教授 ： 卓江

國立清華大學/人文社會學院/外國語文學系/碩士(2009年)

https://doi.org/10.6843/NTHU.2009.00334

摘要

ABSTRACT

Second language (L2) educational practices are often grounded in common sense intuition and persistent pedagogical beliefs. The current study presents an in-depth investigation of one such tradition examining its empirical and theoretical underpinnings. According to this tradition, words of a target language are introduced to L2 learners in groups of semantically interrelated lexical items. Such sets as, for instance, colors (red, blue, green), body parts (head, shoulders, eyes, nose), fruits (apple, pear, peach), etc., can frequently be observed within a single teaching/learning episode and are generally thought of as a beneficial manner of dealing with L2 target vocabulary. The study, in the first place, offers an extended review of the pedagogical perspectives on this issue. This exploration of the educational dimension revealed a broad spectrum of the existent proposals, none of which, however, is based on unequivocal empirical evidence and theoretical understanding. Next, it brings about a detailed discussion of the theoretical views employed for justification of these specific pedagogical views. In particular, it set up a detailed examination of the linguistic theories of semantic fields and semantic frames, explicating their theoretical and empirical development and the application and applicability of these perspectives to issues of L2 vocabulary learning. In addition, it surveyed the cognitive view on lexical meaning, semantic interrelatedness among words and its effects in language processing. The available linguistic and cognitive perspectives present a multidimensional complex of theoretical positions, all of which have apparent relevance to the theme of the current study, and, at the same time, appear as isolated and largely irreconcilable strands of theorizing. The final part of this thesis introduced a theoretical framework capable of unification of these diverse theoretical views, and depicted basic elements and the most fundamental aspects essential for the understating of words’ meanings, their semantic interrelatedness and its effects in vocabulary learning. These primal outlines of the cognitive processes, involved in lexical semantic relatedness and its effects in learning L2 vocabulary make the initial step towards reconciliation of the controversies in the domain of pedagogy and may lead to more coherent account of development of L2 lexical repertoire. The further empirical research might benefit from the available theoretical outlines and bring the more nuanced evidence required for further advancement of theoretical understanding of semantic relatedness among words and its effects in learning L2 vocabulary.

關鍵字

MOGUL ； L2 vocabulary ； semantic category

參考文獻

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