Given that exposure to video programming has been shown to increase students' listening comprehension, the subsequent effects of that increase on communicative competence were studied in order to assess the impact of exposure to authentic video on the language acquisition process. Following their contact with an authentic Spanish-language telenovela, student viewers demonstrated a statistically significant increase over their counterparts in a control group not only in listening comprehension but also in the number of words they used in discourse and in two component parts of communicative competence, specifically, their confidence in generating output and the scope and breadth of their discourse. This study shows that authentic television programming is a valuable tool that provides high levels of input and results in improvements in students’ output.

The Effect of Authentic Video on Communicative Competence

A number of studies claim that knowledge of 5,000–8,000 of the most frequent words should provide at least 95% coverage of most unsimplified texts in English, arguably enough to guess or ignore most unknown words while reading (Hirsh & Nation, 1992; Hu & Nation, 2000; Laufer, 1991; Nation, 2006). However, perhaps hidden in that 95% figure are other kinds of words—multiword expressions—not accounted for by current estimates based on frequency lists. Such expressions are often composed of highly frequent words, and therefore it is possible that such items may go unnoticed by learners reading in the second language. To test this assertion, a two-part test was taken by 101 adult Brazilian learners of English: One part contained short texts composed of the top 2,000 words in English; the second part contained the exact same words, however the arrangement of these same words constituted multiword expressions (e.g., large, and, by → by and large). Tests of reading comprehension indicated that learners' comprehension not only decreased significantly when multiword expressions were present in text but students also tended to overestimate how much they understood as a function of expressions that either went unnoticed or were misunderstood.

Effect of Frequency and Idiomaticity on Second Language Reading Comprehension

This article examines the acquisition of Spanish idioms in a classroom setting that was supplemented with explicit instruction over a 10-week period. The research design manipulated two variables: prior lexical knowledge and idiom organization. Sixty-five second language (L2) learners completed pre- and posttests that measured their ability to recognize and produce the target idioms, as well as a vocabulary test to control for lexical knowledge. Participants in the experimental groups received contextualized idiom presentation that encouraged noticing, retrieving, and generating (Nation, 2001). The results indicate significant treatment effects, although no significant advantage was found for the thematic grouping of idioms. The results also show a significant effect for prior lexical knowledge on one of the dependent variables. These findings are discussed in relation to prior studies of idiom learning from a cognitive linguistics perspective (Boers et al., 2007) as well as psycholinguistic studies that emphasize the salience of literal meanings (Cieślicka, 2006).

Second language idiom learning: The effects of lexical knowledge and pedagogical sequencing

................................................................... i DECLARATION............................................................ iii ACKOWLEDGEMENTS................................................... v TABLE OF CONTENTS.................................................. vii LIST OF TABLES........................................................... x LIST OF FIGURES........................................................ xii Chapter One: Introduction 1.1 Background to the Study.............................................................. 1 1.2 The Statement of the Problem.......................................................4 1.3 Summary....................................................................................28 1.4 The Structure of the Thesis..........................................................28 Chapter Two: Literature Review 2.

The affordances of TV drama in building L2 Chinese learners’ intercultural competence

Idiom acquisition and processing by second/foreign language learners

This article describes the results of a study conducted with twenty-eight adult third-year learners of Spanish in order to investigate (a) the degree to which idiom type affects the speed and ease of idiom comprehension and interpretation, and (b) the effect that context (or lack thereof) exerts on idiom understanding. Findings indicate that (a) there are significant main effects for LL and PLL idioms in both context and non-context treatments: (b) the use of context is of great importance in the construction of idiomatic meaning; and (c) the degree of opacity between target and domain idioms influences the speed and ease of VP idiom understanding, as well as the transfer of L1 idiomatic knowledge, in significant ways. Implications for the classroom and for future research are also discussed.

Killing two birds with one stone: understanding Spanish VP idioms in and out of context

processed video materials protypes regarding Hispanic-America n culture as duced mainly by textbook publishers and Lancompared to Latin-America n culture outside the guage Resource Centers. However, little attenUnited States. Furthermore, this emphasis on the tion has been given to the Spanish-language Hispanic-Americ an culture found within the television (STV) materials that can easily be borders of the United States offers additional recorded with the help of a video recorder. Some opportunities for students to work with and use teaches-s are skeptical about the pedagogical and video materials that are just as authentic and methodological implications involved in the uses purposeful as those from Spanish-speaking

John I. Liontas

Papers

Killing two birds with one stone: understanding Spanish VP idioms in and out of context

From the Living Room to the Classroom: Working with Authentic Spanish Language Videos