Homonymy Related English Vocabulary Learning: Investigating the Difficulties of the Third Year Students

Abstract

Homonymy, as a type of lexical relations between words, is a significant linguistic phenomenon which has received a lot of attention in recent years. English contains numerous homonymous forms with different meanings, which often cause confusion for EFL/ESL learners. In line with that, this research was carried out primarily to investigate the linguistic difficulties of learning and teaching homonymy in English in the Yemeni context. Hence, this data-oriented descriptive study was designed to investigate the difficulties in learning using homonymous English words as the data of the study. A total sample of 80 third-year English major students and 20 of their teachers at the Faculty of Education, Aden, University of Aden, were selected randomly as the subjects for this study. The qualitative and quantitative data required for this investigation were collected by employing two research instruments: a diagnostic test and a questionnaire. The major findings of the study revealed that phonological and orthographical identities of homonymic words, ‘unrelatedness’ of meanings, similarity in pronunciation, insufficient vocabulary size and knowledge, inadequate practice, poor focus in the course materials and stereo-typed teaching methodology contribute to learner difficulties with homonymy. Significantly, the literature survey and the findings of this work would be a modest contribution to vocabulary teaching and learning with special reference to homonymy.