The Effect of Nouns and Verbs of the Same Word on Lexical and Structural Development in the Writings of Iraqi EFL Secondary School Students

In English language, like the vast of languages, a big number of words are utilized to occupy more than one position; these words can be used as both nouns and verbs. Such case brings problems for EFL students aiming to learn the grammatical properties of words. Therefore, it, to a wider or lesser extent, has an effect on the lexical and structural development of the students’ written texts. This paper sheds light on the difficulties faced by Iraqi EFL secondary school students in the perception and use of the words that could be both nouns and verbs. For achieving this, the study employed a writing test consisting of two parts which was conducted by 15 students. In the first part, the students were given 10 sentences and asked to form nouns and verbs out of given underlined words whereas the second part included 10 sentences in which the students were asked to identify if the given bold word is a noun or a verb. The findings, based on a quantitative analysis, indicated that a majority of the participants were unable to use nouns and verbs having the same word in their writings. The findings also showed that participants were unaware of these nouns and verbs. Most of the students could not recognize the given words whether they were nouns or verbs.