Effects Of Sentence Writing On Word Form In L2 English Lexical Learning

Previous research suggests that semantic elaboration facilitates learning for known words (e.g., Craik & Lockhart, 1972). Other studies have found no positive effect for semantic elaboration on new word definition recall (e.g., Pressley, Levin, Kuiper, Bryant, & Michener, 1982). In view of these findings and the inverse relationship found between processing second language (L2) input for meaning and for form (VanPatten, 1990), it is hypothesized that semantic elaboration may negatively affect word form learning (Barcroft, 2000).To test this hypothesis, the present study was conducted operationalizing semantic elaboration as writing new words in sentences. In this study, Chinese-speaking L2 learners of English (N=60) attempted to learn 24 new English concrete nouns while viewing each word along with its picture on a projector screen. This study included two experiments, both of which partially replicated Barcroft's study on 44 English-speaking L2 Spanish learners (Barcroft, 2000). Experiment 1 compared two learning conditions, one in which participants were shown four repetitions of each word for 6 seconds each (no sentence writing) and one in which they were shown once for each word for 48 seconds each and asked to write each word in an English sentence (sentence writing). In Experiment 2, the participants were presented only once for each word for 24 seconds in both the sentence writing and the no sentence writing condition. After the exposure phase, the participants completed four posttests (immediately after exposure, two days later, one week later, and one month later) on which they wrote English words when presented with pictures only. The data were submitted to analyses of variance for syllable scores by using the software SPSS. Condition and time were primary independent variables. Gender and presentation order were secondary independent variables. Number of lexical items produced (score) was the dependent variable. Results of both experiments indicated a negative effect for sentence writing on lexical items produced, suggesting that semantic processing can inhibit form learning by exhausting processing resources that could have been used to encode new word forms. Findings of the study support the predictions of the TOPRA model.