Sex-Disaggregated Inventory of Sexist-Oriented and Other Types of Lexical Errors among First Year BSE English Students
Author: Aquino-Padlan, Christine Inez B.
Date: 2019-12-00
Type: Journal Articles
Subjects: Undergraduate Students,Error Analysis (Language),Second Language Learning,Second Language Instruction,English (Second Language),Foreign Countries,Semantics,Gender Differences,Secondary School Teachers,State Universities,Teacher Education Programs,Taxonomy,Language Teachers,Authentic Learning,Audiovisual Aids,Language Processing,Student Attitudes,Gender Bias,Vocabulary Development,Inferences,Intervention,Language Usage

This study aligns to the field of Lexical Semantics that employ Error Analysis (EA) approach. It is a descriptive study that employed sex-disaggregated data to analyze the formal and semantic lexical errors, as well as the sexist-oriented lexical errors of sixty (60) First Year students of Pangasinan State University-Lingayen Campus, enrolled in the program Bachelor of Secondary Education, major in English (BSE English). Identifying the research population considered proportional sex distribution. The study also aimed to clarify potential factors associated to students' susceptibility to commit lexical errors by correlating a list of variables based on the students' language-learning characteristics. Consequent to its objectives, the study generated a sex-disaggregated inventory of the lexical errors of ESL college learners. The inventory of errors is theoretically restricted by this study's arbitrary classification of lexical error types into formal lexical errors and semantic lexical errors, with various subtypes of errors registered under these general categories that were sourced from various taxonomies of lexical errors. The study also poses theoretical contribution with its inclusion of an additional type of lexical error, i.e. sexist oriented lexical errors (SOLEs). The study was carried out with a gender lens since all the research objectives are permeated by an aim to compare the accounts of the female and male participants. Furthermore, the study used theory-informed and content-validated questionnaires to collect pertinent data. Findings revealed that the female students are highly exposed to various types of authentic materials in English, but with slightly higher opportunity of exposure to &quot;audio-visual materials and online publications&quot;. On the other hand, the male students are also highly exposed to various types of authentic materials in English, but with slightly higher opportunity of exposure to &quot;audio materials&quot;. The female and male students manifest similar patterns of preference for all the lexical inferencing strategies (LISs) that range from &quot;moderate&quot; to &quot;high&quot;, wherein &quot;Meaning-focused strategy&quot; is dominantly preferred, while &quot;evaluating strategy&quot; is least preferred. Moreover, the female and the male students have parallel accounts in terms of their preference for all the lexical processing strategies (LPSs) range from &quot;low&quot;, &quot;moderate&quot;, and &quot;high&quot;. &quot;Non-human resource strategy&quot; is dominantly preferred, while &quot;avoidance strategy&quot; is least preferred. Furthermore, most of the female and the male students imbibe an &quot;active vocabulary dominant (AVD)&quot; orientation. Likewise, both the female and male students are highly susceptible to commit certain types of &quot;formal lexical errors&quot; and &quot;semantic lexical errors&quot;. The two sexes exhibited exactly the same patterns of sexist-oriented lexical errors, which are actually drawn from the pool of formal lexical errors. The sex of the students does not significantly differentiate their rate of susceptibility to commit sexist-oriented lexical errors. In almost all occurrences, the susceptibility of both female and male students to commit sexist-oriented lexical errors, formal lexical errors, or semantic lexical errors is not related to their exposure to any type of authentic material in English, or to their preferential use any lexical inferencing strategy and lexical processing strategy, or their vocabulary orientation based on their active-passive vocabulary index. This is only intercepted by some isolated occurrences such as their preferential use of &quot;avoidance strategy&quot; and &quot;human resource strategy&quot;, which is significantly associated to their susceptibility to commit &quot;inflectional error-noun&quot; (a type of formal lexical error). Likewise, their preferential use of &quot;avoidance strategy&quot; is significantly associated to their susceptibility to commit &quot;formal misinformation&quot; (a type of formal lexical error). Likewise, their preferential use of &quot;human resource strategy&quot; is significantly associated to their susceptibility to commit &quot;collocation errors&quot; (a type of semantic lexical error). On the merits of the research's findings and conclusion that were further signified to existing literature and studies in the field of Lexical Semantics, several recommendations are offered to call the attention and initiative of ESL teachers, school agents, and even Gender and Development (GAD) advocates to reinforce their strategic interventions in order to assist students in their optimal development of lexical competence that should manifest in the alleviation of their lexical errors and their sexist tendencies manifest in their written and oral discourse production.