Duality of Meaning of some English Words: What’s on the Minds of Beginner Mining and Related Engineering Students?

Abstract

The paper studied the meanings of 12 selected English words as written by 289 First Year students offering Mining and Related Engineering programmes at the University of Mines and Technology (UMaT), Tarkwa. The words, namely elevation, surveying, function, sign, model, drive, conductor, power, force, stress, spring, and shear have more than one meaning each - a normal meaning, and a scientific/engineering meaning. The objective of the study was to discover what goes on in the beginner engineering students’ minds when communicating in English, using those words and thereby find out whether they know both the scientific/engineering meanings and the normal meanings of the words. The “writing†exercise was not a test, so the students were relaxed and wrote all the meanings they naturally knew for each word, anonymously, but without reference to dictionaries. The responses were sorted out into five categories as appropriate. The results showed that, out of a total of 289 students, 84 (29.07%) gave only scientific/engineering meanings of some words, 153 (53.00%) gave only normal meanings of some words, 15 (5.16%) gave both scientific/engineering meanings and normal meanings of some words, 32 (11.07%) gave no meanings (nil) of some words, and 5 (1.70%) gave wrong meanings of some words. Contrary to expectation, the majority of the students gave either scientific/engineering meanings only or normal meanings only of some words. Only a few gave both scientific/engineering meanings and normal meanings of some words. Thus, the students possibly have vocabulary challenges. To overcome the challenges, the students should learn and use the different meanings of English words appropriately; lecturers should explain the shades of meaning whenever such words are met in speech or writing; polysemy and homonymy should be emphasised in the Communication Skills syllabus; and yearly follow-up research to track the students’ progress should be conducted.