Learning and teaching the grammatical usage of vocabulary items in English as a second language

In the field of second language acquisition, vocabulary researchers have long noted that fully learning a word includes not only learning its form and meaning, but also acquiring grammatical restrictions on its use (Nation, 2001; Richards, 1976). However, no prior work has sought to categorize the various restrictions and phenomena that fall under this umbrella, nor has a consistent term been adopted to refer to it. The present study named this area of linguistic knowledge the Grammatical Usage of Vocabulary (GUV) and compiled a taxonomy of English as a second language (L2) GUV errors noted in prior work and observed in corpora of learner language. The final taxonomy included errors related to word form and word class, transfer of usage restrictions cross-linguistically, transfer of restrictions intra-linguistically between zero-derived word forms and between synonyms, and argument realization errors with adjectives and verbs. The case of participial (-ing & -ed) adjective usage was then analyzed in detail to determine what might make GUV difficult for learners to acquire, and to develop an argument for why explicit instruction may sometimes be necessary. A mixed-methods intervention study was then conducted with Chinese adult learners of English to determine 1) what qualitative evidence could point to sources of difficulty in learning participial adjective usage, and 2) whether learners\u27 noticing, knowledge, and productive usage of participial adjectives could be assisted through a language-focused task-based intervention with explicit information. Qualitative think-aloud and sentence production evidence indicated that learners\u27 untargetlike usage patterns could be caused by confusions of word forms, low cue reliability, and cross-linguistic transfer. The quasi-experimental results indicated that interactive tasks did encourage noticing of GUV, and qualitative analysis found links between noticing and improvements from pre- to post-tests. However, while the data trended in the expected direction, no conclusive quantitative results were found regarding the efficacy of tasks for knowledge and production of participial adjectives