THE INVOLVEMENT OF BODY LANGUAGE TO HELP ALBANIAN STUDENTS UNDERSTAND, LEARN AND USE AMBIGUOUS WORDS CORRECTLY
Keywords:
Body language, gesture, lexical ambiguity, homonymyAbstract
Vocabulary language acquisition in particular ambiguous vocabulary acquisition has always been an obstacle while learning a second language, which students try to surmount through different strategies and methods. This article aims to highlight the role played by the use of body language in the acquisition of vocabulary and the understanding of lexical ambiguous English words by Albanian students. As one of the first challenges that students encounter in learning a second language (L2) is vocabulary acquisition, especially polysemous words or ambiguous ones, it is very important to find ways that can help facilitate understanding and learning vocabulary in general and ambiguous words specifically. It has been proven by different scholars that body language, hand movements, joint attention, and the presence of multimodal signals, such as eye contact, affect the acquisition process of language and especially polisemous or ambiguous vocabulary (Grzyb & Vigliocco, 2020; Kreysa et al., 2018). Therefore, researchers have tried to find ways and effective methods that can help them avoid any kind of problems or obstacles regarding ambiguous vocabulary acquisition. As the acquisition of the foreign languages consists considerably on the appropriate learning of its vocabulary and the variety of meaning that each word carries, learning vocabulary without difficulty and longstanding needs various strategies. It is raised the hypothesis that the use of body language and gestures can facilitate ambiguous vocabulary acquisition and its proper use. This led us toward our research questions: Does body language and gestures affect the resolution of lexical ambiguity? Can the use of gestures and body language facilitate acquisition and the proper use of the ambiguous words? For this purpose, it is thought to imply in our research 50 Albanian students, who actually study at the secondary school and belong to the intermediate level of language acquisition. The students participating in this study were selected to belong to the same level of language acquisition and were randomly divided into two groups: an experimental group and a control group. In the experimental groups, the ambiguous vocabulary was learned by being reinforced through different body language actions, whereas in the control group the ambiguous vocabulary was taught in the traditional way. The outcomes provide fairly strong support for the gesture effect on vocabulary acquisition in general and the ambiguous one in particular. The results that came out from the study highlighted the importance of body language and gestures for facilitating the understanding of ambiguous words or ambiguous lexicon. It is concluded that the use of body language and gestures or facial expressions facilitates lexical retrieval because the position of the hands and the body not only shows more clearly the intended meaning of the ambiguous or polisemous words used by the interlocutors but also clarify their retrieval and the appropriate use. (Butcher and Goldin-Meadow 2000)
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