Word formation: economic or economical?
In a PAU vocabulary task, candidates complete a text by changing the word in brackets. The text concerns a town's energy plan. Three items are: (1) 'The report focused on the ___ (economy) impact of the plan.' (2) 'After three ___ (success) trials, the system was approved.' (3) 'Residents were ___ (sense) to noise from the new plant.' A candidate writes 'economical', 'successive' and 'sensible'. The candidate explains that they chose the most familiar-looking adjective and that Spanish 'económico' and 'sensible' felt close. The task awards one point per item; spelling must be exact. The candidate has studied English for six years but often relies on Spanish cognates.
1. Give the correct form for each item and explain the meaning difference between the candidate's form and the correct one.
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(1) economic: relating to the economy or to financial systems. 'Economical' means money-saving or efficient, so 'economical impact' would suggest an impact that saves money, not an impact on the economy. (2) successful: achieving the intended result. 'Successive' means following one after another, so 'successive trials' would mean consecutive trials, not trials that succeeded. (3) sensitive: responsive or easily affected by something. 'Sensible' means reasonable or practical, so 'sensible to noise' is semantically odd. The candidate has chosen real English adjectives, but the wrong members of each word family. The context - 'impact of the plan', 'the system was approved', 'noise from the plant' - selects the meaning, not just the part of speech.
2. What morphological and contextual check would prevent all three errors?
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First, identify the required part of speech from the gap: all three need adjectives. Second, identify the meaning required by the surrounding words. For (1), 'impact of the plan' points to the economy, so the base is 'economy' and the adjective is 'economic'. For (2), approval after trials points to success, so 'successful'. For (3), 'to noise' points to susceptibility, so 'sensitive'. Third, learn the contrastive suffixes as pairs: -ic vs -ical, -ful vs -ive, -ible vs -itive. Finally, test collocations: 'economic impact', 'successful trials', 'sensitive to noise' are strong English collocations; 'economical impact' and 'sensible to noise' are not.
3. The candidate says 'sensible' feels right because of Spanish. How should they use L1 as a resource without being misled?
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Treat an L1 cognate as a hypothesis, not as evidence. The candidate can ask: does the English word have the same meaning in a dictionary example, and does it collocate with the words in the gap? Here, Spanish 'sensible' suggests 'sensitive', but English 'sensible' means 'reasonable'. A short false-friend log with pairs such as sensible/sensitive, economic/economical and success/successive would help. The productive step is to write the English definition beside each new adjective and to record one collocation, so the word is stored with its meaning and not only with its Spanish lookalike.