Error analysis of the difficulties the students of the department of English of the College of Arts at Basrah University encounter in understanding the contextual meaning of English polysemes

الملخص EN

The present paper sheds light on a very important subject in reading comprehension, which is polysemy.

The existence of two or more meanings attached to one English word form may confuse students of English in the process of arriving at the intended contextual meaning.

Third–year students' ability to make use of linguistic clues in guessing meaning is tested by asking them to translate thirty sentences involving fifteen polysemes.

The statistical results have shown that third–year students of English encounter serious difficulty in understanding contextual meanings of polysemes although they studied reading comprehension in their first and second years at the department of English.

The researchers, thus, suggest that surmounting such a difficulty involves increasing the students' vocabulary and developing their guessing ability.