Effects Of An Iterative Reading-Writing Integrated Continuation Task On English Semantic Prosody Learning

Semantic prosody is the semantic atmosphere between node words and collocates.It is formed in context and indicates the communicative intentions and attitudes of the speakers.Knowledge of semantic prosody is essential for language learners to communicate correctly and fluently in the target language,while its hidden nature makes it difficult for learners to acquire.The xu-argument was proposed by Wang in 2016,and its core language learning concept of “learn-by-xu” has been verified at various levels,but still lacks sufficient evidence from the perspective of semantic prosody.Iterative reading-writing integrated continuation is one of the applications of xu-argument.It can help learners to acquire the target language by achieving a strong linguistically and contextually interactive alignment between reading and writing.This study attempts to investigate the effects of the iterative continuation on English semantic prosody learning.Two questions are investigated:(1)Can iterative continuation promote the alignment of semantic prosody of nouns,verbs and adjectives?(2)What is the difference of effects on semantic prosody learning between iterative continuation and iterative summary-comment?The subjects in this study were 90 students from two parallel classes of 45 students each in the first grade of a senior high school in China.Class 1 was the experimental group for the iterative continuation task,and Class 2 was the control group for the iterative summary-comment task.Each group performed one round of tasks per week for eight weeks.After the experiment,three corpora were established:the continuation corpus,the summary-comment corpus and the reading material corpus.11 words with semantic prosody analysis value,i.e.,words with more obvious semantic prosodies in the reading materials,were selected as node words(including categories of verbs,nouns and adjectives).Next,the semantic prosodies of node words in different texts were compared and analyzed based on the self-built corpora,combined with contextual evidence from concordance lines,collocates,etc.Results show that:(1)Through the iterative continuation,the alignment of semantic prosody between the reading materials and the extended writing occurs for all node words.At this point,some collocates of node words overlap with those in the reading materials,some are unique to the extended writing;the contexts of node words in the extended writing and the reading materials overlap strongly.However,a node word also constructs a negative semantic prosody unique to the extended writing.At this point,collocates are unique to the extended writing,the specific contexts are inconsistent with the reading materials,and there is a fragmentation between the content of the extended writing and the reading materials.(2)Through the iterative summary-comment task,only six node words receive semantic prosody alignment between reading and writing.They are generally less frequently used and have weaker semantic prosodic strength than those in the iterative continuation.The semantic prosody alignment is weaker than that of the iterative continuation.These results suggest that:(1)Iterative continuation can effectively promote the alignment of semantic prosody of lexical items.Besides,the alignment of collocates and contexts also co-occurs,which is closely related to the quality of students’ writing.(2)Iterative continuation is more effective than iterative summary-comment in English semantic prosody learning.This study verifies the effects of iterative continuation on the learning of English semantic prosody,which further enriches the xu-argument.Besides,it provides a feasible and effective method for English semantic prosody teaching and learning.The limitation of this study is that the subjectivity of the semantic prosody analysis still exists,and the dimension and number of node words selected are relatively limited,which needs to be further improved.