Teaching English Polysemous Words to Iranian EFL Learners: Underlying Meaning Approach and Sense Selection in Comparison
محورهای موضوعی : نشریه تخصصی زبان، فرهنگ، و ترجمه (دوفصلنامه)
1 - دانشیار آموزش زبان انگلیسی، دانشگاه شیراز، ایران
کلید واژه: Teaching vocabulary, polysemous words, underlying meaning approach, sense selection approach,
چکیده مقاله :
The primary goal of this experimental research was to replicate Nakahara's (2005) experiment on Iranian learners' acquisition of polysemous words, and to see whether the underlying meaning approach is an effective strategy to teach polysemous words to low proficiency learners or not. The participants were 46 female first grade students with the age range of 14 to 15 studying in two intact classes of the same high school instructed by the same teacher (researcher). To achieve the research objective, the participants were taught 40 polysemous words using two distinct approaches: one traditional sense selection approach, and the other more modern reference specification approach through the presentation of the underlying meaning. To analyze the collected data, t- test was used. Results of the analysis indicated that the application of underlying meaning approach was more beneficial to Iranian learners than the traditional alternative; that is sense selection approach. The study ends with the pedagogical implications of this principled approach for teaching polysemous words that both EFL teachers in teaching and learners in learning have difficulty with.
The primary goal of this experimental research was to replicate Nakahara's (2005) experiment on Iranian learners' acquisition of polysemous words, and to see whether the underlying meaning approach is an effective strategy to teach polysemous words to low proficiency learners or not. The participants were 46 female first grade students with the age range of 14 to 15 studying in two intact classes of the same high school instructed by the same teacher (researcher). To achieve the research objective, the participants were taught 40 polysemous words using two distinct approaches: one traditional sense selection approach, and the other more modern reference specification approach through the presentation of the underlying meaning. To analyze the collected data, t- test was used. Results of the analysis indicated that the application of underlying meaning approach was more beneficial to Iranian learners than the traditional alternative; that is sense selection approach. The study ends with the pedagogical implications of this principled approach for teaching polysemous words that both EFL teachers in teaching and learners in learning have difficulty with.
References
Aitchison, J. (1994). Words in the mind: An introduction to the mental lexicon.
Oxford: Blackwell.
Bandi-Rao, S., & Murphy, G.L. (2007). The role of meaning in past-tense
inflection: Evidence from polysemy and denominal derivation.
Cognition104, 150-162. doi: 10. 1016/j.cognition.2006.0 5.012.
Boers, F. (2000). Metaphor awareness and vocabulary retention. Applied
linguistics, 21(4), 553-571.
Carter, R & Nunan, D. (2001). Teaching English to speakers of other
languages. UK: Cambridge University Press.
Croft, W., & Cruse, D.A. (2004). Cognitive linguistics. UK: Cambridge
University Press.
Cruse, A. (2000). Meaning in language: an introduction to semantic and
pragmatics. Oxford, Oxford University Press.
Dufour, R., Kroll, J.F. (1995). Matching words to concepts in two languages: A
test of the concept mediation model of bilingual representation. Memory and
Cognition, 23 (2), 166-180.
Durkin, K., & Manning, J. (1989). Polysemy and the subjective lexicon:
Semantic relatedness and the salience of intraword senses. Journal of
Psycholinguistic Research, 18, 577-612.
Falkum, I.L. (2011). The Semantics and Pragmatics of Polysemy: A Relevance‐
Theoretic Account. Ph.D. dissertation, University College London, UK.
Firth. J. R. (1957). A synopsis of linguistic theory 1930-1955. Studies in
Linguistic Analysis,1–32.
Freeman Baker, C. (1999). Seeing clearly: Frame semantics, psycholinguistics,
and cross-linguistic approaches to the semantics of the English verb see.
Ph.D. dissertation, University of California: Berkeley. Retrieved from
ProQuest (UMI: 9966295).
Geeraerts, D. (1955).Words and other wonders: papers on lexical and semantic
topics. Cognitive linguistics research, 33.
Hatch, E., & Brown, C. (1995). Vocabulary, semantics, and language
education. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Klein, D. E., & Murphy, G. L. (2001). The representation of polysemous
words. Journal of Memory and Language, 45, 259-282.
Klepousniotou, E. (2001). The processing of lexical ambiguity: Homonymy
and polysemy in mental lexicon. Brain and Language, 81, 205-233.
Rashidi, N. / Journal of Language, Culture, and Translation 2(1) (2013), 83–101
100
Li-szu Huang, M. ED. (2003). Resolving word sense ambiguity of polysemous
words in a second language. Ph.D. dissertation, University of Texas: Austin,
Retrieved from ProQuest (UMI No: 3148414).
Loewen, S., & Morimoto, S. (2007). A comparison of the effects of imageschema-based instruction and translation-based instruction on the
acquisition of L2 polysemous words. Language Teaching Research, 11(3),
347–372.
Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics. 3rd ed.
(2002). UK: Pearson Education Limited.
Nakahara, A. (2005). The effect of instruction of underlying meaning of
polysemous words. Ph.D. dissertation, Retrieved from ProQuest (UMI No:
3178817).
Nation, I.S.P. (1990). Teaching and learning vocabulary. Boston,
Masschusetts: Heinle & Heinle publishers.
Nation, I.S.P. (2000). Learning vocabulary in another language. New York:
Cambridge University Press.
Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary.8th. (2011). Oxford: Oxford University
Press.
Potter, M.C, So, K-F, Von Eckardt. B, Feldman, L.B. (2004). Lexical and
conceptual representation in beginning and proficient bilinguals. Journal of
Verbal Behavior, 23 (1), 23-38.
Pustejovsky, J. (1995). The generative lexicon. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Riemer, N. (1972). The semantics of polysemy : reading meaning in English
and Warlpiri. Cognitive linguistics research, 30.
Romero, C. (2004). Making sense of word senses: Evidence for a lexical
ambiguity continuum. MA Thesis, McGill University, Montreal.
Rumshisky, A. A. (2009). Verbal polysemy resolution through contextualized
clustering of arguments. Ph.D. dissertation, Retrieved from ProQuest (UMI
No: 3339382).
Schmitt, N. (1998). Tracking the incremental acquisition of second language
vocabulary: A longitudinal study. Language Learning, 48, 281–317.
Seidenberg, M. S., Tannenhaus, M. K., Lieman, J. M., & Bienkovski, M. (1982).
Automatic access of meanings of ambiguous words in context: Some
limitations on knowledge-based processing. Cognitive psychology, 14, 489-532.
Simpson, G.B. (1981). Meaning dominance and semantic context in the process
of lexical ambiguity. Journal of verbal learning and verbal behavior, 20,
120-136.
Rashidi, N. / Journal of Language, Culture, and Translation 2(1) (2013), 83–101
101
Srinivasan, M., & Snedeker, J. (2011). Judging a book by its cover and its
contents: The representation of polysemous and homophonous meanings in
four-year-old children. Cognitive Psychology, 62, 245–272.
Sullivan. F.J. (2006). Developing knowledge of polysemous vocabulary. Ph.D.
dissertation, University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
Swinney, D.A. (1979). Lexical access during sentence comprehension:
(re)consideration of context effects. Journal of verbal learning and verbal
behavior, 18, 645- 59.
Taylor, J. R. (2002). Polysemy’s paradoxes. Language Sciences, 25, 637-655.
Tylor, A., & Evans, V. (2001). Reconsidering prepositional polysemy
networks: The case of over. Language, 77, 724–765.
Williams J. N. (1992) Processing polysemous words in context: Evidence for
interrelated meanings. Journal of Psycholinguistic. Research, 21, 193-218.
