Effects Of Morphological Instruction Research Articles

Exploring the Effect of Morphological Instruction on Vocabulary Learning among Iranian EFL Learners

Vocabulary knowledge plays a crucial role in academic development and therefore scholastic success (National Reading Panel, 2000). Also, students' vocabulary knowledge expands through a variety of ways. One of the most practicable strategies in vocabulary learning supported by many researchers is using affix knowledge. The purpose of present study is to investigate the effect of morphological instructions on vocabulary learning among Iranian secondary school students. Participants in this study were sixty Iranian secondary school students who were assigned to control group (30) and experimental group (30). A pre-test and post-test comprising two vocabulary tests measuring students’ morphemic analysis of general English words were administered. The data were analyzed using the Independent Sample T-test to determine if there were improvements made in the two measures within each group, and subsequently whether the magnitude of improvement between the two groups were significant. The results indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control group in the process of guessing the meanings of complex words depending on the morphological analysis. Furthermore, the results did not show significant differences between Morphological Relatedness Strategy and Morphological Structure Strategy in terms of students' achievements.

Using eye tracking to understand the responses of learners to vocabulary learning strategy instruction and use

This study examined the influence of morphological instruction in an eye-tracking English vocabulary recognition task. Sixty-eight freshmen enrolled in an English course and received either traditional or morphological instruction for learning English vocabulary. The experimental part of the study was conducted over two-hour class periods for seven weeks. To investigate the effects of morphological instruction on English vocabulary learning, all participants completed an English vocabulary recognition task. Fixation time and path during recognition were recorded with an eye-tracking device. A comparison between the post-test performances of both groups showed that the experimental group obtained a considerably higher score on the target eye-tracking vocabulary test. The results of the eye-tracking record showed that participants who received morphological instruction had longer fixation times on the vocabulary and morpheme areas compared with the group that received traditional instruction. In addition, the experimental group had dense fixation paths on the morpheme areas of vocabulary. These results indicate that participants who received morphological instruction considered the morphemes as inferring references to read and inferred unknown words with greater success.

Effects of morphological instruction on vocabulary acquisition

The effects of a 20-session intervention targeting morphological word structure on vocabulary knowledge were investigated in four Grade 4 and 5 classes, assigned randomly to treatment and control conditions. Hierarchical regression analyses controlling for initial vocabulary showed significant instructional effects on morphological analysis and vocabulary with words that were taught directly and novel words built on bases that were taught in the context of other derivations, but not for words with untaught bases. Results indicated that the treatment group made better use of pre-test vocabulary knowledge in learning new vocabulary. Results are discussed in light of the growing debate regarding whether to teach many words in a shallow way or to provide deep, rich instruction about fewer words.