An Investigation into the Levels of Difficulty of Certain Semantic Word Classes in a Bilingual Setting

Abstract

Although typologies of word difficulty have been proposed since the 1970s, the word classes identified do not easily inform syllabus design or translate readily into classroom teaching strategies. Very little of this type of research has concerned itself with which semantic classes are likely to be easy or difficult for learners in a bilingual setting. The aim of the research reported in this paper was to determine which semantic classes were being easily learned and which were causing difficulty for pupils in Brunei Darussalam's bilingual education system. A second aim was to determine through an analysis of pupil translation errors, which factors made a particular word, or class of words difficult to learn. Pupils were tested on their ability to translate five hundred words from Nation's (1984) high frequency word list. The results suggest that semantic class is indeed a general indicator of how difficult a word may be for pupils to learn. The analysis of learners' translation errors suggested that the main cause of difficulty is relationships within semantic fields: pupils have a general idea about the meaning of the problematic words but seem unable to find an appropriate equivalent in their first language.