초록 열기/닫기 버튼
A multitude of factors are involved in the process and outcome of second language (L2) learners’ vocabulary learning. One relevant area of research concerns the identification of semantico-syntactic and morpho-phonological features related to a word’s learnability. The present study attempts to investigate how far such factors influence the ability of Korean elementary students to recognize and produce L2 English words. Participants from 12 classrooms in 3 different schools carried out a variant of Wesche and Paribakht’s (1996) Vocabulary Knowledge Scale, consisting of 39 words selected from the word list that they had learned in the previous year. Although the students had been taught in different learning contexts with varying materials, sequences, and input frequencies, they showed a largely shared pattern of acquisition. In order to assess the relationship between a word’s lexical properties and its learning difficulty, a set of form- and meaning-related factors proposed in earlier works were taken into account. It was found that semantic factors such as meaning specificity and context-sensitive polysemy exerted a significant effect on learnability while phonological factors such as number of syllables, foreign phonemes, foreign consonant clusters, and incongruent sound-spelling pairings did not.
