Multi-Faceted Morphological Awareness and Vocabulary Knowledge in English as a Second Language Learners: A Multivariate Analysis

Abstract

This study investigates the role of morphological awareness in ESL vocabulary acquisition. Participants were 198 Chinese college students enrolled in a joint program which required them to study in China for the first two years and then study in the U.K. to complete their degrees. They completed a total of four paper-and-pencil tests: morpheme discrimination, morpheme recognition, vocabulary size test (VST) and word associates test (WAT) tests. We drew upon path analysis to explore the interconnected relationships among multiple explanatory variables (facets of morphological awareness) and outcome variables (facets of vocabulary knowledge). The results demonstrated that English derivational awareness was strongly predictive of both ESL vocabulary breadth and ESL vocabulary depth, and that preexisting ESL vocabulary breadth could enhance the relation between derivational awareness and ESL vocabulary depth. To summarize, these results indicate that an improved English derivational awareness not only helps to expand ESL vocabulary size but can also consolidate learners' deep understanding of word properties, which will in turn assist them to establish connections with other associative words and phrases.

Finding the sweet spot: Learners’ productive knowledge of mid-frequency lexical items

“…Their findings showed that the various dimensions of lexical knowledge had different patterns of development, with spelling benefitting most from the first few exposures, knowledge of meaning requiring between three to seven exposures, and knowledge of parts of speech developing smoothly across exposures. The Chen and Truscott study is representative of many studies adopting the dimensions approach in that a narrow number of lexical items are tested in depth, rather than a broader yet shallower view of a range of lexical items (e.g., Fitzpatrick, 2012;Haomin & Bilü, 2017;Read, 1998).…”

“…Of the two, lexical depth is more challenging to define and measure due to its multi-dimensional nature (Haomin & Bilü, 2017;Schmitt, 2010) and because breadth and depth grow in relation to one another (Milton, 2009).…”

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Research into vocabulary knowledge often differentiates between breadth (how many words a person knows) and depth (how well the words are known). Both theoretical categories are essential for understanding language learners' lexical development but how the different aspects of vocabulary knowledge interconnect has not received the same attention as each individual dimension (Haomin & Bilü, 2017), especially in terms of productive knowledge (Mantyla & Huhta, 2014).This study analyzes lexis from mid-frequency lemmas in the K3-K9 frequency bands from the learner corpus PELIC (Juffs et al, 2020). Critically for learners, mastery of lexis in this frequency range is essential for achieving the English proficiency required for university study.From these mid-frequency items, a dataset of 7,554 tokens were collected from word families with multiple derivations and manually annotated.

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“…Research into vocabulary knowledge often differentiates between breadth (how many words a person knows) and depth (how well the words are known). Both theoretical categories are essential for understanding language learners' lexical development but how the different aspects of vocabulary knowledge interconnect has not received the same attention as each individual dimension (Haomin & Bilü, 2017), especially in terms of productive knowledge (Mantyla & Huhta, 2014).…”

The predictive role of morphological awareness and productive vocabulary knowledge in L2 postgraduate students’ academic writing

“…Kirby et al, 2012;Li & Chen, 2016), and receptive vocabulary (e.g. Akbulut, 2017;Haomin & Bilü, 2017;Khodadoust, Aliasin, & Khosravi, 2013;Kraut, 2015;Latifi, Kasmani, Talebi, & Shirvani, 2012;Sparks & Deacon, 2015;Sumarni, 2016;Tabatabaei & Yakhabi, 2011;Varatharajoo, 2016;Yucel-Koc, 2015;Zhang & Koda, 2012). The relationship between morphological awareness and learners' spelling skills has also been examined (e.g.…”