Teaching Semantic Prosody of English Verbs through the DDL Approach and its Effect on Learners' Vocabulary Choice Appropriateness in a Persian EFL Context

Abstract

This study examined teaching SP of English verbs through the data-driven learning (DDL) approach and its effect on learners' vocabulary choice appropriateness in the Persian English foreign language (EFL) context. In the present study, two male intact classes were selected. One of these two classes was randomly selected as a treatment group and another one as a control group. The treatment group was provided with SP instruction through the DDL approach. The control group was exposed to SP as well, but traditionally and not through a DDL approach. The corpora used in the DDL approach were the Brown corpus and British National Corpus (BNC). Pretests and posttests of vocabulary choice appropriateness were administered and a repeated-measures ANOVA was used to compare means of test scores within and between subjects. The results indicated that SP instruction through DDL was significantly an effective approach to improve EFL learners' vocabulary choice appropriateness.