With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, new words appeared in English. EFL learners need to learn the new words. Learners depend on many strategies to help them learn new terms. Investigating this topic is significant because it will contribute to the knowledge of teaching and learning new words that appeared rapidly and suddenly. This study aims to investigate the acquisition of word-formation processes related to COVID-19 terms. The research seeks to answer two questions: (1) Are Saudi female EFL learners familiar with English word-formation processes? (2) Do word-formation processes aid Saudi female EFL students in learning COVID-19 pandemic terms? The study used a quantitative method. The data was collected from 71 Saudi female students via a multiple-choice electronic questionnaire. The results revealed that the percentages of incorrect responses were higher than the percentages of correct ones, thus suggesting that the students were not familiar with word-formation processes. The findings showed that they had similar results in words formed via compounding and blending, indicating they failed to distinguish between the two processes. The findings show that the Saudi female students did not prefer to use a word-formation process over the other. Further, results showed that even though some of the common COVID-19 terms frequently were used on a daily basis, the students failed to predict and use the correct word-formation processes for those terms. The findings as a whole reveal that Saudi learners had difficulty in learning word-formation processes deriving COVID-19 terms. The study proposes some recommendations for further research.

中文翻译：

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调查沙特女学生对与 COVID-19 大流行术语相关的单词形成过程的熟悉程度

随着 COVID-19 大流行的爆发，英语中出现了新词。英语学习者需要学习新单词。学习者依靠许多策略来帮助他们学习新术语。研究这个主题很重要，因为它将有助于教授和学习快速而突然出现的新单词的知识。本研究旨在调查与 COVID-19 术语相关的构词过程的习得。该研究旨在回答两个问题：（1）沙特女性 EFL 学习者是否熟悉英语单词形成过程？(2) 构词过程是否有助于沙特女性 EFL 学生学习 COVID-19 流行病术语？该研究采用定量方法。这些数据是通过多项选择电子问卷从 71 名沙特女学生那里收集的。结果显示，错误回答的百分比高于正确回答的百分比，这表明学生不熟悉构词过程。研究结果表明，他们在通过复合和混合形成的单词中具有相似的结果，表明他们无法区分这两个过程。调查结果表明，沙特女学生不喜欢使用单词形成过程。此外，结果表明，即使每天经常使用一些常见的 COVID-19 术语，学生也未能预测和使用这些术语的正确构词过程。整体研究结果表明，沙特学习者在学习衍生 COVID-19 术语的构词过程方面存在困难。