The study involved 42 first-year university students in Flanders who were upper-intermediate English learners. They watched a 1-hour documentary called "Uses and Abuses" by Stephen Fry about language. The study focused on 56 formulaic sequences that occurred in the documentary as target items. It employed vocabulary tests before and after viewing to measure participants' form and meaning recall of the target items. Questionnaires assessed participants' viewing habits, comprehension of the documentary, and recognition of the target items and purpose of the tests. The goal was to examine incidental learning of formulaic sequences through viewing full-length L2 television input.
2. Participants
❖ Hello everyone,
❖ My presentation will cover the methodology part of the research starting with
the participants of the project.
❖ The study involved seventy-seven Flemish EFL learners in their first year at
the University.
❖ Data from 35 participants were removed from the current study because they
did not attend all the four sessions as well as not having Dutch as their first
language.
❖ Therefore, the total number of participants was reduced to 42.
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3. Cont. of Participants
❖ 32 female and 10 males with Mage=18.72 and a range of 11.
❖ The participants could be considered to be upper-intermediate
learners of english (B1-B2).
❖ Vocabulary Levels Test showed that the participants were familiar
with 5000 frequent word families in English (Schmitt et al., 2001).
❖ Viewing habits shows that the participant watch English Television
with or without subtitles (Peters, 2018; Peters et al., 2019).
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4. Input
❖ The study employed “Uses and Abuses” of Stephen Fry’s Planet Word as the audio visual input
relevant to the language learners.
❖ The full-length documentary focused on the swearin and euphemisms in language.
❖ The one hour documentary is used in the research because the full length program portrays a better
viewing behavior in participants (Peters and Webb, 2018).
❖ In addition, the full length documentary provides a variety of formulaic sequence relevant to the
research that would be impossible with a short clip video as input.
❖ The input had 8124 tokens and 1,085 types that 91% belonged to 2000 frequent word families
according to British National Corpus (BNC).
❖ Also contained in the input are 93.76% types that belonged to the 3000 frequent word families
found Compleat Lexical Tutor (Cobb, n.d.).
❖ The percentages were considered recommendable for comprehension according to the vocabulary
levels test on the learners.
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5. Target Items
❖ The study focused on fifty-six occurring formulaic sequence(FS) in the input
(the documentary) as the target items.
❖ The target items were selected using quasi-random method which contained
combined words that are considered formulaic.
❖ The study then employed Sketch-Engine to determine whether the MI score
of each FS were more than 3 in the OpenSubtitles corpus (Kilgarriff et al.,
2014).
❖ All the formulaic sequence contained lexical words with exception of
prepositions, proverbs, and other types of structural formulaic sequence
(Granger & Paquot, 2008).
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6. Cot. of Target Items
❖ A large number of target items were selected to capture as much incidental
learning as possible as opposed to the previous studies.
❖ Partially learned FS were detected by the use of both high and low-frequency
items.
❖ In the final selection, the items contained twelve compounds including 6 phrasal
verbs, 7 idioms, 23 lexical collocations, 6 grammatical collocations, 1 simile, and 1
binomial.
❖ All the FS occurred only once in the documentary except for eight items.
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7. Cont. of Target Items
❖ Other than the 56 target formulaic sequence, the study employed nine
distractor items to control the test effects.
❖ The nine distractor items were FS derived from the 2011 OpenSubtitles
corpus.
❖ The study then opted for 60 target items and 10 distractors as a pilot program
with a group of second-year students in the same University.
❖ The research therefore tested for difficulty of the targeted items where those
items easily known by participants were eliminated from the final study.
❖ The final study contained 56 target items and 9 distractors.
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8. Target Items: Item-related Factors
❖ Collocate-Node Relationship: Nuon-noun, verb-noun, adjective-noun, verb-
particle, verb-preposition, and other.
❖ Congruency: The study analysed the influence of the participants’ L1 by
labeling the FS as congruent and noncongruent.
❖ Transparency: Semantic transparency of the target items were determined
as free combinations, restricted collocations, figurative idioms, and pure
idioms
❖ Statistical measures: For all target items, raw frequency values and MI scores
were obtained from the OpenSubtitles 2011 Learning Formulaic Sequences
through Viewing L2 Television 533 corpus using SketchEngine.
❖ Prior knowledge of the target items at the level of meaning recall
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9. Vocabulary Tests
❖ Two vocabulary tests were designed to measure knowledge of the form-
meaning link at the meaning recall and form recall levels of strength.
❖ In the form recall test, participants were asked to provide the written form of
the target items based on a Dutch equivalent or meaning description.
❖ In the meaning recall test, participants were asked to provide the meaning of
the target items.
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10. Questionnaire
❖ Participants were issued two short questionnaires.
❖ The first tested TV viewing habits and the contents of the documentary.
❖ The participants were tested on the minimal comprehension of the input as
well as the
❖ The second questionnaire asked the participants about the experimental
treatment.
❖ The participants were tested if they recognized the target items and the
purpose of the tests.
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