The Challenges of Homographs among EFL Learners of the College of Foreign Languages

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to investigate the erroneous use (misuse) of homographs among EFL learners of the College of Foreign Languages to determine the misuse of homographs among EFL learners, find out the ability of EFL learners to distinguish homographs, and enrich learners with different usage of some words included in the homographs. The sample of the study consisted of 30 participants, 15 each of male and female students, randomly selected from 7th – 8th levels of the College of Foreign Languages in Albaha University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The participants were assigned to (2) different experiments. A homograph definition was given to them at the beginning of the experiments to make sure that they were equivalent and homogenous. Two different tests were undertaken by the students and the results were obtained. The findings revealed a significant deficiency of students in the first experiment in which they were required to give multi-meanings for each homographic word. This led to the conclusion that there is a serious learning problem as seen in the students’ competence and performance.