A STUDY OF THE STUDENTS' ERRORS IN THE LEXICAL ASPECTS IN ENGLISH

	A STUDY OF THE STUDENTS' ERRORS IN THE LEXICAL ASPECTS IN ENGLISH
journal of the college of basic education
Article 1, Volume 12, Issue 56, 2009, Pages 85-96
Abstract
Students are admitted to the English Department of the college of Arts after having studied English for eight years in primary and secondary schools .At college , they continue studying English for another four years . Many students , however , fail to recognize or/and produce certain aspects of language ,although they might be considered as advanced learners of the language . Some of them continue to make errors related to language forms and meanings , being unable to recognize the relationship among various forms and meanings especially in certain contexts . An analytic study of these errors , connected with the lexical aspects ( i.e., polysemy & synonymy ) in English , may prove pedagogically valuable in identifying these errors and in suggesting remedy . The present study attempts to identify this pair of lexical aspect in English with respect to form and meaning : Polysemy and Synonymy . Such identification may help to investigate whether the above categories influence third-year students' acquisition and comprehension of various lexical aspects in English . Accordingly , the present study comprises four sections : Section One is devoted to the definition and limitation of the problem of the lexical aspects in English ( i.e., Polysemy & Synonymy) . The section also outlines the hypothesis , the procedure followed , the data collected and used in this investigation , and the significance of such a study for Iraqi advanced Learners of English and for those teaching and writing texts for this purpose . Section Two identifies this pair of lexical aspect . It surveys the ideas of sameness and multiplity of meanings and touches on their main features and branches The section focuses on the contextual relationships between this pair of lexemes as well as considerations such as homonymy, hyponymy , autonomy ,metaphor , and ambiguity. Section Three deals with the experimental work . A diagnostic test is constructed to find out the types and number of errors made by those students of the English Department , College of Arts / University of Baghdad in the area of the lexical aspects of free morphemes in English . The test is divided into two main parts : the first is linked with the skill of recognition and the second with that of production . Each part is further subdivided into various degrees of facility and discrimination levels and with respect to the relationship existing between the form and the meaning Thus , the results can be summarized : a. Iraqi third-year students at the English Department , College of Arts are better at recognition than at production of lexical aspects ( i.e., Polysemy & Synonymy ) . b. Female students are comparatively higher in language competence than male students in both the recognition and production parts of the test . Section Four presents the final conclusions which the analysis of students' performance on the test fields . Some recommendations are suggested for learning and teaching of the lexical aspects which may be of value to non-native learners and to text-book writers who prepare valuable books for the college students in different Iraqi Universities

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