An Assessment of EFL University Students' Realization of Various Layers of Meaning
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Abstract
Understanding a foreign language is an important task in communication. One way of understanding it is to know the term “meaning” and its various layers especially, any language consists of a certain levels of meaning which have a lot of common denominators. Meaning is described by many scholars as a very complex phenomenon and a disputable subject which is related to a variety of aspects of human knowledge and experience of life. English language constitutes of many layers such as, literal, denotative, connotative, and interpretative, etc. These levels should be presented in the mind of the learners who are going to learn the highly stylistic and interpretative English texts.
Iraqi learners of EFL mostly face difficulties in realizing the various layers of meaning. Hence, this study is an attempt to assess EFL university students' efficiency in realizing the various layers of meaning through formulating a number of hypotheses to be verified and aims to be achieved. A representative sample of EFL fourth year students is chosen from the College of Education for Humanities during the academic year 2018-2019. An Achievement test is constructed, validated, and applied to the selected sample of students. The collected data has statistically been treated in order to verify the formulated hypotheses and achieving the constructed aims in terms of the obtained results.
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