An Empirical Study On Implicit And Explicit Learning Of Semantic Prosody

Semantic prosody is an important concept in language studies which refers to "the spreading of connotational colouring beyond single word boundaries". Previous research has revealed that lack of semantic prosody knowledge will cause non-vernacular or incorrect use of English by Chinese learners. Therefore, it is necessary to conduct further studies on the acquisition of semantic prosody.This paper explores the effects of three learning methods on the consciousness of semantic prosody knowledge acquired by second language learners of English, as well as on the learning outcome. The three learning methods are reading, rules-searching, and the combined method. The first two correspond to implicit learning and explicit learning respectively. The students’ attitudes towards these methods and their conception about semantic prosody are also examined and discussed. Based on an experiment conducted on48English majors and the post-experiment interviews, the study yielded the following findings:First, each of the three learning methods contributed to both conscious and unconscious structural knowledge, but the proportion was found to be different among the three methods. The combined method contributed to mainly conscious knowledge while the reading method and the rules-searching method involved more unconscious knowledge. The subjects using the rules-searching method have difficulty finding the rules and thus resort to intuition and guess which contribute to unconscious knowledge. It is revealed that the process of memorising and finding rules can boost the efficiency of each other in converting information into conscious structural knowledge.Second, the combined method was the most effective one among the three. On the one hand, reading for memorising could help the students seek rules easily. On the other hand, the rules could facilitate memorising. The results also suggested that the proportion of conscious structural knowledge moderated the outcome of the rules-searching method and the combined method. The more conscious knowledge the students acquired, the higher scores they achieved.Third, the reading method was not favoured by the subjects while the comments on the rules-searching method were neutral or slightly negative. In comparison, the combined method was found to be the most welcomed one. As for the students’ conception about semantic prosody, none of them had heard of this concept before and they did not understand this concept accurately. However, they expressed willingness to learn it in the future.Both theoretical and pedagogical implications are drawn from this research. Theoretically, the present study has deepened the understanding of the acquisition of semantic prosody and provided some insight into its implicit and explicit learning. Pedagogically, this study provides the teachers and students with empirical evidence which can facilitate the designing of better methods for teaching and learning semantic prosody.