RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Bridging the Gap Between L1 and L2: Enhanced Emotional Vocabulary Through Elaborative Processing in Spanish‐Speaking English Language Learners
A1 Sánchez, María Jesús
A1 Pérez‐García, Elisa
A1 Arroyo, María Belén López
A1 Bermúdez‐Margaretto, Beatriz
K1 Adquisición de lenguas
K1 Inglés como lengua extranjera
K1 Lenguaje emocional
K1 57 Lingüística
AB Foreign languages are often learnt in formal and disembodied environments which may limit the emotional resonance of theirvocabulary and their pragmatic usage in real-life communication. In a context of English as a foreign language (EFL), this studyexamines whether elaborative processing as a teaching strategy leads to changes in the affective evaluation of English words andthus enhances the acquisition of emotional vocabulary. A pre-test/post-test designwas employed in order to assess the effect of thistype of instruction. A group of 35 Spanish EFL students participated in two training sessions, with generative processing exercisesthat involved multiple modalities (visual and spoken language, body expression, and gestures) at production and comprehensiondomains and that focused on 36 English words (12 positive, 12 negative, and 12 neutral). Another set of 36 non-trained words wascarefully selected andmatched to trained words across several psycholinguistic variables. Crucially, stimuli selection was based ontheir high emotional discrepancy between English native speakers and Spanish EFL learners, as observed in our normative study.The students rated the full set of 72 words in two emotional dimensions (valence and arousal) before and after the instruction.Results revealed the enhancement of the negative emotional connotations for negative trainedwords in EFL and an alignmentwiththe affective responses reported by English native speakers. These findings confirm the effectiveness of this elaborative processingapproach for the teaching of emotional vocabulary in formal contexts of EFL. The stronger impact of this instruction on negativeemotional language suggests its attenuation in additional languages and underscores the importance of addressing this type oflanguage in EFL instruction.
PB Wiley
SN 0802-6106
YR 2025
FD 2025
LK https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/84392
UL https://uvadoc.uva.es/handle/10324/84392
LA eng
NO International Journal of Applied Linguistics
DS UVaDOC
RD 16-may-2026