A study on the Lexico-Semantic Errors of Iranian Students LearningEFL

This study investigated some problems of Iranian students due to transfer of some features of their mother tongue (Persian) to the target language (English). More specifically, it was claimed that the majority of Iranian students have problems using some English words appropriately because of crossassociation mechanism. For this purpose, 30 students were asked to participate in the study. They were given15 sentences in Persian and their equivalents in English with a missing word in each for them to provide. The sentences included some problematic words in order to determine whether the students were able to translate them or not. Then, the sentences were analyzed in terms of lexical errors without taking account of structural deficiency. It was shown that most of the students committed errors in distinguishing correct words because the intended English words were those for which there was just one word in Persian. This study has pedagogical implication for teachers and syllabus designers in order to focus on some problematic areas of foreign language learning.

Keywords:

transfer , cross-association errors , translation and lexical errors