Implications of Proper Nouns in L2 Vocabulary Learning:

The purpose of this paper is to observe whether participants truly recognize the importance of low-frequency words such as proper nouns. For this, the movie Noah(Aronofsky, 2014) was chosen as material. Participants who volunteered to participate in this experiment were four college students all with intermediate reading ability in English. Four tests were administered to them. Three of the four tests asked about proper nouns and one asked about content words associated with the proper nouns. The results showed that all the participants ignored the spellings of proper nouns in the first test. The results in the second test showed that they successfully memorized the spellings of the proper nouns, but failed to catch their implied meanings. Most had a good memory of proper nouns and answered questions in the third test correctly. In the final test, one participant correctly answered most of the questions about the content words, two participants correctly answered more than half the questions about the content words, and the last participant answered less than half the questions about the content words correctly. Through the tests, all the participants realized that proper nouns were worth studying because they could be the key to understanding the text and because they led to easy memorization of the relevant content words