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.

Keywords:

• Morphology
• compounding
• second language acquisition
• Arabic-speaking EFL learners

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Creative compounds which include metaphor and\or metonymy subsumes both endocentric and exocentric compounds as argued by some researchers, e.g., Benczes (2006) and Zibin and Altakhaineh (2018).

2. It should be noted that another classification was proposed by Scalise and Bisetto (2009) in which another level was added to show the different types of semantic/interpretive relations between the two elements of attributive and subordinative compounds, but not coordinate. Thus, we chose to follow their 2005 classification as we could not find enough examples on each category based on the 2009 classification; we needed three examples of each category.

3. Compound nouns, as discussed previously, are defined as two or more words joined together to create a new meaning which functions as a single unit, e.g., bookshop, whilst collocations are defined as words or phrases that are commonly used together (with a frequency that is greater than chance), e.g., deep sleep.

4. https://elt.oup.com/feature/global/oxford-online-placement/?cc = jo&selLanguage = en.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no direct funding for this research.