The Ability of Iraqi Undergraduates to Recognize and Produce Confusing Words in English

This research describes the problem of lexical choice and the representations of world knowledge. This is done by shedding light on some confusing words in English (Appendix 1). This study has two hypotheses: the Iraqi undergraduates at the Department of English/ College of Education/ University of Thi-Qar face difficulty in recognizing and producing the confusing words in English and the undergraduates at the first, second, third and fourth years do not make the progress of semantic knowledge as it should be when they move from one year into another. To confirm the two hypotheses, two recognition and production tests are designed. The jury members have given valuable suggestions about their validity, easiness/difficulty and time that the testees need to answer. The tests aim at finding out whether the subjects are able to recognize and produce the confusing words in English and which progress they achieve when they are in an advanced year. Depending on the results of the two tests, the two hypotheses are confirmed. The undergraduates are unable to recognize and produce the confusing words easily but their receptive knowledge is better than productive one. Furthermore, the first year subjects are better than the second year ones in their responses and similarly the third year subjects have correct responses more than their fourth year competitors while the latter are better than the second year subjects. So it is a matter of language knowledge (keeping more vocabulary in mind in addition to other aspects of language) not of the stages at which they are studying.