Previous Research on Word Classes In SLA
Research on lexical inferencing (i.e. learners’ use of cognitive strategies and knowledge sources in comprehending unfamiliar vocabulary in texts) has provided some insights into word class knowledge in the L2 context. Lee and Wolf (1997) embedded nonsense words in authentic reading passages in order to determine whether L2 learners of Spanish are sensitive to the grammatical category of unknown words. Their results indicate that learners of all proficiency levels were more successful at identifying the grammatical class than guessing the meaning of the target words. However, the beginning-level learners (students enrolled in a second-semester course) were consistently less successful at grammatical category assignment than more proficient learners.
For example, the nonsense word acricion (a noun) was interpreted as an adjective by many of the beginning-level learners. Lee and Wolf (1997) also illustrated how these beginners often misunderstood the context surrounding the target (i.e. nonsense) word, resulting in ‘laborious struggles with word inferencing’ (p. 51). For example, one learner confused the adverb probablemente (‘probably’) with the nounproblema ‘problem’. In another study of L2 word inferencing, Watts (2004) also describes learners’ ability to infer the grammatical class of novel words without necessarily knowing their meaning. To explain these findings, Watts suggests that learners were relying on their LI knowledge of word classes given the relatively restricted number of categories to choose from. Additional L2 vocabulary acquisition studies have addressed the issue of word class through a focus on derivational morphology. Schmitt and Zimmerman (2002) have investigated learners’ productive knowledge of derivatives in the four major word classes (i.e. noun, verb, adjective, and adverb). Their results reveal that L2 learners generally have weak knowledge of derivatives, and that knowledge of one member of a word family (e.g. assume) does not guarantee knowledge of related forms (e.g. assumption). Schmitt and Zimmerman (2002) discuss some pedagogical implications of their study and suggest that explicit teaching of derivative forms could enrich vocabulary learning in the L2 context. Based on this idea, Morin (2003, 2006) designed a pedagogical treatment for teaching Spanish derivational morphology to first- and second-year learners; the goal was to expand learners’ vocabularies by making them more aware of word-formation processes. The participants completed tests of receptive and productive knowledge of Spanish word families. An important finding of Morin’s (2003) research is that beginning learners experienced difficulty in the receptive mode, that is, when the correct derivative was presented to them as an option. Thus, Morin (2003, p. 209) described first-semester students’ receptive knowledge of word classes as ‘extremely limited’.
In terms of production, Whitley (2004) found numerous examples of verbs used as nouns, nouns used as adjectives, and adjectives used as nouns in a written corpus of L2 Spanish. He points out that ‘one of the main problems these advanced students have … is not the lack of a word for a desired meaning, but uncertainty about how to adapt a word they do know so as to derive the corresponding adverb, noun, adjective, etc.’ (Whitley, 2004, p. 169, emphasis original). For Whitley, advanced learners’ lack of control over derivational morphology is one of the main sources of lexical errors. Interestingly, nearly half (44.5%) of the errors documented by Whitley could not be attributed to transfer from the LI.
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