Lexical acquisition in second language learning.
Item
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Title
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Lexical acquisition in second language learning.
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Identifier
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AAI9618043
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identifier
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9618043
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Creator
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Babbitt, Marcia.
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Contributor
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Adviser: Edward H. Bendix
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Date
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1996
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Language, Linguistics | Education, Language and Literature | Education, Bilingual and Multicultural | Education, Community College
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Abstract
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This study, designed to look at lexical acquisition among L2 English learners in college-level ESL classes, focuses on lexical errors and presents a typology of these errors based on a conception of how word meanings are learned and represented in the mind. According to this conception, word meanings have internal structure. An important aspect of this study is to test this conception of the nature of word meanings and its application to second language lexical acquisition.;The study used two tasks, a cloze production task and a recognition task requiring subjects to distinguish between correct sentences and sentences with incorrectly used lexical items. Error words were taken from students' in-class writing samples. The 87 students who participated in the study represented three college ESL proficiency levels.;One result of the study was that students did better on the cloze production task than on the recognition task which required them to judge the semantic correctness of sentences. This suggests that in lexical tasks, L2 learners do not do as well on explicitly metalinguistic tasks as they do on tasks that are not explicitly metalinguistic.;A second result was that, with respect to both tasks, performance regarding within-word errors, those errors involving components of a word's meaning, improved as lexical acquisition progressed. More particularly, general-to-specific errors, those lexical errors involving the use of a word with a general meaning where one with a more specific meaning is required, decreased with increasing lexical proficiency. These results suggest that learners build up the internal componential structure of the meanings of individual lexical items and that they add more specific concepts to general ones as their English lexicons develop more precise meanings for words. This result lends support to the decompositional typology set forth in this study.;Two other outcomes which emerge from this study are (1) there was an improvement in lexical competence from proficiency level one to two, but none between two and three, and (2) there was no statistically significant relationship between years in the United States or years studying English in the United States and lexical proficiency.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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PQT Legacy CUNY.xlsx
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degree
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Ph.D.
