4.3.1. The students’ ways of disambiguating lexical ambiguity
Question 9. How can lexical ambiguity be disambiguated? Students’ responses
(S=40)
Number Percentage
Provide additional contexts or any pieces of information to the ambiguous word of a sentence 26 65%
Change the vocabulary collocation 14 35%
Analyze the context to understand the correct meaning of the word. 17 42.5%
Table 8. The students’ resolutions for disambiguating lexical ambiguity
As we seen on table, to disambiguate lexical ambiguity, 65% students think providing additional contexts or any pieces of information to the ambiguous word of a sentence is the most effective resolution. “Analyze the context to understand the correct meaning of the word” comes in the second rank with an approval rate of 42.5%. The least one is “change the vocabulary collocation” selected by 14/40 students (35%). 4.3.2. The students’ …show more content…
This figure is rather more than a half of respondents. For the sentence (6), there are 19 in totals of 40 students that have the correct answer, making up for 47.5%. Besides, 67.5% students can interpret the sentence (8) correctly. This figure is quite high. With the least percentage (42.5), the sentence (9) is not easy for students to explain it in more than one interpretation. In general, the average percentage of students’ correct answers for lexically ambiguous sentences is 53.8% and the gap among the percentage of correct answers is not so different. This means students’ ability in understanding lexical ambiguity is not good. However, there are still nearly a half of students who cannot describe the sentences which are lexically ambiguous sentence in a correct way. They may not know all of the meaning of polysemous words in the sentences above and prefer to use the meaning which is more familiar to