Synformic Confusion at the Advanced Level in EFL Teaching in Academic Contexts

Jornada; III Jornadas de ELT en la UNVM: Rethinking English Language Teaching; 2015

Universidad Nacional de Villa María

Using words correctly is one component of language proficiency and must therefore be of importance to language teachers at academic contexts. This presentation will make reference to such factors as Spanish, a knowledge of the semantics of English morphology and reading comprehension skills in terms of how they impinge upon the correct choice of a word as opposed to any of its synforms, within the context of a focused practice of global comprehension skills and word formation at the advanced level. Synforms are words with similar forms but different meanings and/or uses. This paper derives from the research project entitled Impacto de un registro de contenidos léxicos en el aprendizaje de vocabulario con dificultades generadas por similitud morfológica y especificidad semántica en niveles post-intermedio y avanzado de ILE (inglés como lengua extranjera) directed and co-directed by Marcela González de Gatti (M.A.) and Professor Dolores Orta, respectively. The project identifies synformy as a source of difficulties for advanced students but does not look into the possible causes of "synformic confusion" (Kocić, 2008). Through error analysis (Ellis, 2008; Khansir, 2012) we undertake a classification of the students? mistakes (observed in exam exercises) and hypothesize that they often arise from a combination of interference of the mother tongue and an overgeneralization of the learners? interlanguage rules (Brown, 1994), or from a weak grammatical competence, regarding the semantic component that is always present in certain morphemes (Scarcella & Oxford, 1992). On numerous occasions, a lack of comprehension of a text leads to the use of an incorrect word. These hypotheses, drawn from a review of past exams, serve as a springboard for another research being carried out a micro-level (within the scope of one course at the National University of Córdoba) that seeks to confirm them hypotheses and find ways to grapple with synformic confusion.