Lexical challenges in English speaking skills among Armenian students

Abstract

In the study we investigated, the possible lexical errors that Armenian students encounter while trying to speak English. This is a mixed method research and the sample of the study includes 38 undergraduate students from the faculty of International Relations. The data was collected from the students via debates. The debates were audio-recorded and after transcribed, the lexical errors were identified and classified according to error taxonomy. Their knowledge of vocabulary was measured through vocabulary size test in order to find the relationship between the vocabulary size and error rate. The findings of the research showed that there were five types of lexical errors that students made during their argumentative speech. The findings as well showed that most of the time students rely on their mother tongue while speaking. Hence, interlingual errors happen more often than intralingual errors. In the end correlation analysis showed that there is a statistically significant negative correlation between vocabulary size and context errors.