Sources for meaning input

In terms of sources of meaning input, participants relied on meaning group, meaning, example verbs, and example sentences. For each source, participants indicated both positive and negative experiences of meaning construction, as illustrated in the following examples:

Meaning group. The introspective data suggested that participants learned the meaning

of the patterns or confirmed their prior knowledge of patterns by reading the page containing the meaning groups. The following comments from students’ retrospective verbal protocols and

semi-structured interviews illustrate how students recalled their use of the meaning group help:

First, I read the verb pattern “V n to n” and then the “show” group. I checked the meaning I know before from there. (Student 1, retrospective verbal protocol)

I know the meaning of this verb. I read the meaning group. It helped me double check my knowledge of the meaning. (Student 7, retrospective verbal protocol)

While I am reading this front page, I found something that was unfamiliar to me using “out of” of construct. I learned the meaning here, but I just want to know more. (Student 2, retrospective verbal protocol)

I read the pattern and meaning group in the front page together so that I can know the general meaning of the pattern (Student 12, semi-structured interview)

Despite the abundance of positive evidence, there were a few examples of negative evidence. Such evidence revealed two reasons why participants might have failed to obtain meaning of the patterns from the meaning groups. The first reason centered on limited

one of the meaning groups caused the failure; “Associate here belongs to the ‘associate’ group. I

don’t know the meaning of associate, so the it does not help me” (Student 9, retrospective verbal protocol). The other reason indicated that meaning presented in PAT GRAM contradicted participants’ prior knowledge. In this regard, one student reported that the information about the

meaning group provided contrasted his/her prior knowledge of patterns’ meaning. This student reported, “I read the meaning group, but I didn’t understand why the verb ‘display’ belongs to ‘the clean group’ ” (Student 11, retrospective verbal protocol). This statement indicated that the

participants seemed to lack flexibility when understanding the category of the meaning group, or participants need more exposure to explicit instruction provided by PAT GRAM so as to become more familiarize with the differences between meaning in the dictionary and meaning in PAT GRAM.

Meaning. Besides meaning groups, participants also relied on the meaning section in

PAT GRAM to obtain the meaning of patterns. Different from meaning groups, which used one or two verbs in a meaning group to represent the whole group, the meaning section provided more detailed explanation of the meaning of a group. Some participants commented on their experience of relying on the meaning sections to build an association between patterns and meaning. Generally, all participants indicated that they were able to understand the meaning of the patterns or confirm the information they obtained from the meaning groups. The following utterances from verbal protocols and interviews exemplify how participants reported their use of the meaning sections in PAT GRAM:

I read “showing something to someone.” It is same to the meaning group and what I expected. (Student 7, retrospective verbal protocol)

When I read the example sentence, I find that the meaning of the words in the example sentences is not similar to what I thought. So I read the meaning part to clarify. (Student 11, retrospective verbal protocol)

When I didn’t know the pattern I definitely read the meaning to understand it. (Student 3, retrospective verbal protocol)

I also relied on the meaning section to make sure I used it in a right way. (Student 10, semi-structured interview)

As reported in the above comments, when reading the meaning section, participants directly extracted the meaning of patterns, compared the meaning section with their prior knowledge, or associated the meaning section with the meaning group.

However, when the meaning section was too long or participants had no knowledge of vocabulary used for explaining the meaning of certain patterns, participants failed to read or understand the meaning of some patterns. One participant reported that he did not read the meaning section, since the explanation was too long (Student 3, retrospective verbal protocol). Another participants failed to understand the meaning of the pattern “associate with n,” due to limited vocabulary; “ ‘These word are concerned with associating with someone’ I don’t know

the meaning of associate, how can I know what associating with someone mean, so that confused me a little” (Student 9, retrospective verbal protocol).

Example verbs. According to the introspective data, participants considered example

verbs useful in assisting them to (1) expand their vocabulary knowledge and (2) deduce the meaning of the target verb patterns by applying the knowledge that verbs under the same meaning group share a similar meaning. The utterances below demonstrate how participants commented on the usefulness of example verbs:

I read the highlighted verbs. I learned “endeavor” and “attempt” have the same meaning with “try.” (Student 4, retrospective verbal protocol)

I learned that they (“construct” & “fabricate”) have similar meaning with “make” and share the same pattern. It’s efficient to learn. (Student 5, retrospective verbal protocol) I read the highlighted verbs to get the meaning of the target verbs. (Student 1, semi- structured interview)

If I couldn’t figure out the meaning from meaning and example sentences, I would read example verbs to look at other verbs that can be replaced. (Student 2, semi-structured interview)

Participants also reported failure to relate the target verbs to other example verbs, because 1) participants did not agree that the example verbs should be categorized into the same meaning group or because 2) participants failed to understand the observation of pattern grammar that verbs nested under the same meaning group share a similar meaning. These two reasons can be identified in the following comments made by two participants:

This time no, because I did not know that “abandon” has similar meanings with “attempt”. (Student 11, retrospective verbal protocol)

I did not understand what are the verbs for, so I did not read any of the verbs. (Student 7, retrospective protocol)

Example sentences. The introspective data suggested that example sentences provided

participants with positive learning experiences by providing contextual meaning of verb patterns. Participants’ comments presented below illustrate how they learned practical use of patterns in

sentences by reading example sentences:

I was reading the example sentences. It has “lack” here, so I get some ideas of its meaning and how to use it. (Student 7, retrospective verbal protocol)

I looked at the example sentences directly to get an idea of how to use this pattern, because I know the meaning of this pattern. (Student 5, retrospective verbal protocol) I went through all the example sentences so that I can make sentences with correct pattern and meaning. (Student 1, retrospective verbal protocol)

I also read the example sentences to learn how to use my verb in sentences. (Student 1, semi-structured interview)

It seemed that when attending to example sentences, participants not only extracted the meaning of target patterns, but also learned how to produce sentences with correct pattern and meaning. This observation suggested that, different from other sources for meaning input, which facilitated learning of receptive knowledge of patterns, example sentences assisted participants in transferring receptive knowledge of patterns to productive knowledge.

However, extracting meaning from example sentences was sometimes frustrating. One participant indicated that he avoided reading example sentences with excessive length; “I

remember just like one sentence I didn’t really understand because it was very long” (Student 10,

semi-structured interview). Another participant reported that example sentences with high

difficulty level prevented him from understanding the meaning, commenting “I read the example sentences, but I could not understand the sentences, so I had to go back to the meaning” (Student

6, retrospective verbal protocol). Also, when the example sentences did not exemplify patterns of the target verb, one participant felt confused, remarking “I read the example sentences. I was trying to find ‘interpret’ first in the example sentences, but it’s not there. So I’m confused”

(Student 3, retrospective verbal protocol).

All participants reported that, even though they clearly understood the meaning of the patterns, creating correct and meaningful sentences was still a difficult task. The example sentences provided them with rich contextual meaning, and was thus ranked among the most helpful sources for meaning construction. For this specific study, participants reported having some prior knowledge of the meanings of most patterns, so they tended to skip the other sources, including meaning group, meaning, and example verbs. For instance, Student 8 reported “When I know the meaning of the patterns, I went to the example sentences direct to see how they can be used in real sentences” (Student 8, semi-structured interview). Despite other sources of meaning

being reported less frequently, 11 participants expressed the necessity of keeping them, since when they did not know the meaning of the patterns, they needed to rely on these sources as well.