Quantitative and Qualitative Aspects of Advanced Learners’ L1 and L2 Mastery of Polysemous Words

Abstract

In the present investigation, 15 fi rst-term university students were faced with forty decontextualised polysemous words in English (L2) and Swedish (L1) respectively and asked to indicate which, of a set of six meanings, adhered to the item in question (two to fi ve of the meanings were correct). The polysemous words were of varying frequency. The investigation thus addresses the following research question:In quantitative and qualitative terms, what knowledge do advanced students have of polysemous words in their L2 as compared to their L1?Results show that most students have a relatively poor knowledge of polysemous words in both languages, especially in their L2. Furthermore, while the frequencies of the test items have no impact on the students' achievements, the relative frequencies of the meanings of the test items and the number of meanings of each test item stand in direct relation to whether the item is known or not in both languages.

Analyzing the Acquisition of English Polysemy of Chinese High School Students: a Quantitative Study

“…The last finding is consistent with what Karlsson found in his study in 2013 that students have a better command of the most frequent meaning of polysemous words than the less frequent ones [8]. And also Zhang and Wen have found that Chinese students tend to know more about the highfrequency senses of English polysemous phrasal verbs than the low-frequency ones [15].…”

“…Sometimes the core meaning is followed by semantically closest meanings, with more marginal uses appearing later [7]. Karlsson found that Swedish advanced speakers of L2 could get only a third of the full score on average on a multiple-choice test covering forty polysemous words, appearing to know the most frequent sense of a polysemous word better than the less frequent ones [8].…”

“…In this study on the acquisition of English polysemous words by Chinese high school students, to guarantee the objectiveness and validity of the final result, 30 English polysemous words are selected to form the test (adapted from Karlsson [8]), which are all from the outline of Chinese University Entrance Examination. In the 30 polysemy, 10 are nouns, 10 are verbs and 10 are adjectives.…”

“…The data findings as in table 5 show that 1): for more than half of the polysemous words in the test, students appear to know the most frequent meaning better than the less frequent ones, and for the other polysemous words in the test, which are words of number 1, 2, 6, 7, 9, 16, 21, 23, 24, 25, 28, 30, students seem to know the second or third frequent meaning better than the most frequent one. 2): for the polysemous words of number 4,8,11,12,13,14,15,20,29, the percentage of students choosing the second frequent meaning is either higher than the ones choosing the third frequent meaning or lower than the ones choosing the third meaning (within 10%), whereas for the word "position" of number 19, the percentage of students choosing the third frequent meaning is remarkably higher than the ones choosing the second frequent meaning.…”

Contextualized Teaching of Different Senses of “al-” in Turkish as a Foreign Language

“…Because it is a widely encountered phenomenon and the number of senses is particularly high in high-frequency words, polysemy causes problems to foreign language learners at all levels. The studies (Schmitt, 1998, Karlsson, 2013Öztürk, 2018) show that even advanced learner's knowledge of different senses is inadequate. This inadequacy leads to problems in foreign language teaching both in terms of language production and comprehension (Watanabe, 2014;Saito, Webb & Trofimovich, 2016;Öztürk, 2017).…”