Volume 50, Issue 4

Discussions about the adult L2 learning capacity often take as their starting point stages where considerable L2 knowledge has already been accumulated. This paper probes the absolute earliest stages of learning and investigates what lexical knowledge adult learners can extract from complex, continuous speech in an unknown language after minimal exposure and without any help. Dutch participants were exposed to naturalistic but controlled audiovisual input in Mandarin Chinese, in which item frequency and gestural highlighting were manipulated. The results from a word recognition task showed that adults are able to draw on frequency to recognize disyllabic words appearing only eight times in continuous speech. The findings from a sound-to-picture matching task revealed that the mapping of meaning to word form requires a combination of cues: disyllabic words accompanied by a gesture were correctly assigned meaning after eight encounters. Overall, the study suggests that the adult learning mechanism is a considerably more powerful than typically assumed in the SLA literature drawing on frequency, gestural cues and syllable structure. Even in the absence of pre-existing knowledge about cognates and sound system to bootstrap and boost learning, it deals efficiently with very little, very complex input.

The study set out to examine the partial word knowledge of native speakers, L2 advanced, and intermediate learners of English with regard to four word features from Richards' (1976) taxonomy of aspects describing what knowing a word entails. To capture partial familiarity, the participants completed in writing a test containing low and mid frequency content words, accompanied by a word knowledge scale. The analysis showed that there were three distinctive patterns of partially familiar vocabulary but their distribution across the three groups was quite different, which indicated that partial knowledge was linked to different word features across the three proficiency groups. It was also of interest to explore whether the participants maintained similar associative connections for their frontier words and whether a word association task would capture partial familiarity. Overall, participants' associative domains for frontier words did not reveal any consistent associative behavior that would distinguish between proficiency groups.

This paper proposes a new method for the combined teaching of pronunciation and vocabulary to learners of English as a foreign language (EFL). While there is commonly strong emphasis on the teaching of vocabulary, pronunciation teaching is frequently neglected in the EFL classroom. The proposed method aims to address such imbalance which may affect learners' general fluency skills, degree of intelligibility and communicative competence. The paper provides a detailed account of the new method which argues in favour of organising new vocabulary according to some aspect of the phonological form of the word. It discusses the major principles the method is founded upon (i.e., categorisation and selected learning strategies) and presents two examples to illustrate its application. Finally, it elaborates on the potential advantages this method may have for the acquisition of pronunciation and vocabulary and presents the major procedural steps the teacher can follow when implementing this method.