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Developing a link between a word’s form and its meaning has been
considered the minimum requirement for knowing a word. This is because if a
learner is fully aware of a word’s meaning, but lacks knowledge of its form,
recognizing or producing the word will not be possible. Similarly, if a form
is familiar, but the corresponding meaning is not, the word will be of no
communicative use (Schmitt, 2010). Thus, meaning and form are highly
interconnected that rich knowledge of one, for example meaning, may be
useless if no equal knowledge of the other, form, is acquired. However, to
date, little attention has been paid to investigate whether L2 learners have
corresponding levels of knowledge of both meanings and forms. This study
compares the amount of knowledge learners have of form and meaning of 25
English words. The format of the form-meaning link test developed by
Goldstein and Laufer (2004) was implemented in developing the instrument of
the current research. Four subtests –form recall, form recognition, meaning
recall, and meaning recognition- were administered to 32 Saudi female EFL
learners. Their knowledge of word meanings, depending on their performance in
the two meaning tests, was found to be almost double their knowledge of word
forms, as their combined results of the two form tests indicate. This finding
does not only reinforce Arabs’ difficulties with vocabulary word forms. It
also questions the validity of the implicit-learning approach to the
acquisition of forms when our goal is to help learners have equal knowledge
of forms and meanings. The researcher aims to revive the explicit learning of
word forms through the teaching of fixed spelling patterns in order to create
a balanced form-meaning link.
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