Resumen de A lexical‐semantic and syntactic‐grammatical analysis of Zambian English: Towards a ‘meaning‐to‐grammar hypothesis’ of classroom second language instruction
This study is an attempt to compare the intuitions and reasoned judgments of second language learners of English on a number of semantic and syntactic phenomena in the language. Using the speech processing approach, subjects were tested on lexical‐semantic and syntactic‐grammatical linguistic performance tasks. Interest was motivated by the role of semantic space and formal space in language acquisition (cf. Slobin, 1985). In turn, interest was motivated by recent studies on the role of implicit‐ and explicit knowledge in language acquisition, on the one hand, and meaning‐focused and form‐focused second language classroom instruction, on the other. Basing our arguments on an authentic data base and related studies, we conclude that since learners’ scores on the semantic phenomena tasks appear, comparatively, significantly higher than on syntactic phenomena tasks, it is logical to assume that classroom instruction should attempt to follow the same route. Hence, the ‘Meaning‐to‐Grammar Hypothesis’.
