The Role of L1 in EFL Learners’ Meaning Construal of Polysemous Nouns

A learner of any foreign language has the arduous task of mastering
the vocabulary of that particular language, especially if the person wants to reach a nearnative
level of proficiency. It is one of the most dreaded parts of learning a foreign
language, with English being no exception. In this paper, the role of Macedonian as the
learners’ L1 and its influence on the understanding of different meanings of polysemous
nouns will be examined. The study described in this thesis was conducted to test the
hypothesis that learners will transfer some meanings from their L1 into English and
distinguish between metonymical and metaphorical extensions of meaning which could
affect the acquisition differently. Given that the study was based on another study
dealing with a very similar topic, the nouns selected for the instrument were mostly
taken from that study, which deals with polysemous nouns in English and Turkish. Some
specific examples for Macedonian were added to the study for accuracy reasons. In the
aforementioned study, the author Meral Ozturk (2018) tests each word twice: in its core
sense and in its extended sense. This approach was adopted for the study at hand, along
with the methodology for testing the data. The main criterion for selecting vocabulary
for the instrument was that the words had to be familiar to the participants, as the aim
was to test if they could discern core and extended meanings of the words with which
they should already be familiar, and not to choose the ones the learners are unacquainted
with. The first part of the paper deals with the theoretical background and explains the
different aspects of polysemy as the main focus of the paper, as well as the difference
between polysemy and homonymy. This lays the foundation for data processing in the
discussion part of the thesis. The second part of the paper presents the study itself, its
aims, and the means through which it was conducted. After that, there is a discussion
about the results of the study and the main conclusions are drawn.