RAISING LEARNERS’ AWARENESS OF CROSSLINGUISTIC DIFFERENCES THROUGH THE PHENOMENON OF FALSE COGNATES

Abstract

This study was conducted to explore the influence of English-majored students’ knowledge of first foreign language on their learning of French vocabulary through the phenomenon of false cognates. The study surveyed 27 English-majored students studying French as an additional foreign language at the University of Foreign Languages and International Studies, Hue University. Data were obtained from French-to-English Translation-Based Discourse Completion, with 28 sentences containing false cognates, and Retrospective Interviews asking students about what they thought and how they responded while they were translating French sentences. The findings show that students thought about an English lexical equivalent to a French lexical items based on the similarities in forms between the two languages. Students’ use of false cognates has hindered their understanding about lexical semantics, leading to misunderstanding and mistranslation of the source language. On the premise of the findings, different waysof raising learners’ awareness of crosslinguistic differences through the phenomenon of false cognates have been recommended.