Morphological awareness (MA) is the ability to recognize words, identify the association between lexically attached parts of a word and create new lexical forms. Morphological instruction mediates the acquisition of new words and is, therefore, crucial for developing morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. Currently, the receptive-productive continuum of MA remains unclear, especially in an EFL context. This quasi-experimental study investigates how MA instruction affects the acquisition of morphologically complicated words and its impact on vocabulary knowledge among young Thai EFL learners. Six receptive and productive MA measures and four vocabulary knowledge measures were administered to 221 EFL young learners. While participants in the control group did not get this instruction, participants in the experimental group received explicit teaching on morphological awareness. A repeated measures ANOVA (with scores on several aspects of affixes as the dependent variable) with experimental and control cohorts and a repeated measure (time point) was conducted to probe Thai young EFL learners’ morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. The findings demonstrated an encouraging effect of MA teaching in English language classrooms. Specifically, the participants in the experimental group showed improved performance in both receptive and productive MA. This suggests that the explicit instruction of morphologies may benefit English learners in understanding words and ease vocabulary acquisition. Other implications of these findings are debated, considering current pedagogical practice and theory.
Understanding how words are formed is a crucial component of learning new words. A child’s ability to manipulate the morphological elements of words is related to their subsequent vocabulary development. Morphological awareness can also enhance learning new syntactic and semantic properties of morphologically complex words to meet the demands of language production. However, there is a dearth of research on how receptive-productive morphological awareness is acquired, especially in an EFL context. This study used a quantitative design to explore the nature of morphological awareness in 104 Thai primary school students and to investigate the relationships between receptive-productive morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. All participants were given six measures of morphological awareness and two vocabulary knowledge tasks. The results revealed the close relationship between the students’ morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge, both receptively and productively. The results also indicated that Thai primary school students’ morphological awareness grows gradually along the receptive and productive continuum and that morphological knowledge is learned at varying rates and improves with learners’ increased education levels. Indeed, all aspects of morphological awareness contributed to receptive and productive vocabulary knowledge. Overall, the current study highlighted the importance of the word family construct for teaching and learning morphologically complex words. It was also shown that morphological awareness is a crucial mechanism for vocabulary acquisition and growth and a facilitative scaffold for forming morphologically complex words.
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