FREQUENCY EFFECTS IN LEXICAL ACQUISITION: A CONTEXT OF GRAMMAR CLASS

Öz

It is almost a century that Palmer (1937) first suggested about the significance of frequency in vocabulary acquisition. Since then on, countless discussions conducted over the issue from the points supporting and falsifying the claim. But what made all these studies similar to one another was the study context. All the studies aimed to reveal the frequency effect had preferred to study in reading classes; furthermore, they had divided the frequency only into two as high and low. However, could frequency not be regarded more than high and low? Then, Nation (2006) introduced a new term ‘mid-frequency’, which is a term studied few. All told so far was the hub where the present study stemmed from. This study aimed to reveal the possibility of lexical acquisition through frequency effect in a context where the focus is not vocabulary, but grammar. The second associative purpose was to investigate if there is mid-frequency effect or not. The vocabularies of the book that students studied through two terms were analysed, and categorized as high-, mid-, and low-frequency. Then each frequency vocabularies were asked to the participants. As last, which frequency type got the highest correct reply was detected, and each frequency was compared to one another through ANOVA analysis to see if there was any significant difference among high-, mid-, low-frequency vocabularies. The findings showed both parallelism and divisions to the studies in the literature.

Anahtar Kelimeler

• Frequency
• acquisition
• growth
• vocabulary
• development

Kaynakça

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