Speaker
Description
When acquiring vocabulary, L2 learners must understand a word’s form, meaning, and use, which involves more than memorizing one-to-one correlations between languages. Frame Semantics (Fillmore, 1982), an approach to words as evoking a common theme or “frame,” provides language learners and teachers a way to organize vocabulary meaningfully and thus functionally. For lexicographic purposes, Frame Semantics has only been used to structure monolingual lexical databases for a variety of different languages, however it has not been applied systematically to learners’ dictionaries so far. This talk presents the G-FOL (www.coerll.utexas.edu/frames/), a beginning learner’s dictionary of German for speakers of English based on semantic frames from the English FrameNet database (Fillmore & Baker, 2010) mapped onto vocabulary used in introductory German courses at the University of Texas at Austin. Working with the original semantic frames from Berkeley FrameNet, a group of faculty and graduate students uses corpus data together with native speaker intuitions to compile a freely available frame-based learners’ dictionary for firstyear German students (Boas et al., 2016; Gemmell Hudson, 2022). The goal of this effort is to create a learning tool that allows students to systematically learn how to use words related in meaning in context, using the culturally appropriate forms. This part of the presentation focuses on the problem of taking the Berkeley FrameNet frames for English and adopting them in a simplified version for the German learner’s dictionary. We will review how the process takes the frame descriptions and adjusts them to the word lists that beginning learners of German use in the classroom. G-FOL has many affordances for language learners and instructors for vocabulary learning, because information about words on G-FOL is organized via the semantic frame they evoke. Instructors can develop units around frames, develop themed vocabulary list, and provide useful metalinguistic awareness for existing knowledge. This presentation first 39introduces Frame Semantics and FrameNet, and then presents the workflow, organization, and structure underlying G-FOL. The remainder of the presentation discusses concrete examples of the G-FOL in practice, including lexical entries based on semantic frames and annotated corpus examples, including contrastive example sentences in German and English. We will also discuss the use of authentic corpus examples, images used for illustrative purposes, and additional information regarding multiword expressions and morphology. Finally, we show how semantic frames cannot only be used to structure a learner’s dictionary of German, but it also shows how grammar can be made more accessible to students using the same semantic frames by relating them in a way that highlights its purpose and function in the target language. We will take German’s dative case and ditransitive construction as our examples, linking them to the Giving frame and the various German verbs, nouns, and adjectives that evoke it. In addition, we present a number of teaching and learning strategies that put the lexical and grammatical information provided by G-FOL at the centre of the students’ learning.
