Jordanian EFL Learners’ Production of Synonyms

Abstract

This paper reports on the findings of a study that explored Jordanian EFL learners’ production of synonyms. The data were elicited through a translation task which consisted of 20 Arabic sentences to measure Jordanian EFL learners’ ability to produce the correct synonym in contextualized English sentences. The subjects were asked to translate whole sentences from Arabic into English. Each sentence contains a certain Arabic word that has a specific appropriate English equivalent out of a number of semantically interrelated words that belong to the same category. These words were selected from Sheeler and Markley (1982). The findings indicate that Jordanian EFL learners face serious difficulty in dealing with synonyms on the production level. This can be attributed to some reasons, namely the transfer of training, the complexity of the foreign language, the lack of some English lexical items, the confusion of words on the ground of formal similarity, and the EFL learners' limited knowledge of English in general and of collocations in particular. Furthermore, the subjects employed a number of strategies to compensate for their lack of knowledge, such as overgeneralization, semantic approximation, literal translation, and message abandonment when they encountered a problem in rendering a target word.