The comprehension of English compound nouns by Arabic-speaking EFL learners

Abstract

This paper examines the comprehension of English compound nouns by sixty Arabic-speaking EFL learners majoring in English at the University of Jordan, Amman. It explores the problems that these learners may encounter in understanding certain types of compounds, namely, subordinative, attributive and coordinative, based on the notions of endocentricity and exocentricity. Participants whose English proficiency level was advanced took a test to identify the meaning of an underlined compound, without using a dictionary. The responses to the three different types of compounds were analyzed using Two-Way repeated measures ANOVA. The results showed that the differences between endocentric and exocentric subordinative compounds were statistically significant in favor of the former. We argue that endocentric, especially subordinative endocentric compounds, were more easily understood due to their semantic transparency, i.e., the entire compound is a hyponym of its head, and to the similarity of this type of compound in the participants’ first language. The study provides some pedagogical implications for teaching compound nouns to EFL learners.