Cultural Depiction in L2 and L3 EFL Learners’ Vocabulary

Abstract

The connection between lexicon and culture is crucial in foreign language pedagogy (Wierzbicka 1997; Sharifian, 2009). Although some studies have previously focused on the relation between culture and vocabulary in EFL textbooks input (Canga Alonso & Cifone Ponte, 2016; Canga Alonso & Cifone Ponte, 2021), and 2nd Baccalaureate EFL Spanish students’ cultural available lexicon (Canga Alonso, 2021) to our knowledge, nothing has been published in linguistic circles regarding L2 and L3 EFL learners’ cultural available lexicon at the end of compulsory secondary education. Hence, the aim of this study was threefold: (i) to identify the number of cultural words produced by L2 and L3 adolescent EFL learners in response to two stimulus words: Food and Drink and Festivities, (ii) to explore the number and kind of words which were alike in students’ responses to both cue words, and (iii) to analyse whether the elicited words belonged to source, target or international cultures. To that end, a sample of thirty L2 and L3 10th graders were tested on their cultural lexical knowledge by means of a PdLex task using the aforementioned stimulus words. Data were collected in March/April 2024 by means of an online PdLex task which also included a background questionnaire and an English proficiency level test (OPT). Lexical units from the vocabulary output were lemmatized adopting the same criteria as in previous PdLex studies (Jiménez Catalán & Ojeda Alba, 2009; Canga Alonso, 2021). The cultural meaning of the lexical units gathered from the task was checked using the Longman’s Dictionary of English Language and Culture (2005). After being lemmatized, each file was subjected to frequency analyses by means of AntConc to obtain word frequencies. Our findings revealed that our informants produced more cultural words in response to the traditional cue word Food and Drink than to the specific cultural stimulus Festivities. All the elicited words were nouns. Finally, most of our students’ responses to the prompts surveyed referred to international culture which concurs with previous research with older learners (Canga Alonso, 2021). However, we find references to the source culture in L3 learners’ answers. In view of these results, we can conclude that 10th graders seem to produce the same kind of cultural words regardless of the nature of the cue words used to collect the data (i.e. traditional or culture specific prompts) and their background languages and cultures.