The Effect Of Cultivating Morphological Awareness On Junior High School Students’ Acquisition Of English Derivatives

It is generally known that vocabulary teaching is the key point to English teaching in Junior Middle School. Richard (1976) claims that vocabulary ability can be concluded into eight aspects. The grasp of word base and its derived form is regarded as one of the important lexical competence. Meanwhile, although derivative acquisition can effectively promote the growth of vocabulary size, its teaching effect is not satisfying for a long time. With the development of cognitive psychology, the morphological processing theory and noticing hypothesis provide a broader vision for derivative acquisition. In recent years, some studies demonstrate that the enhancement of morphological awareness is due to the application of morphological processing theory and noticing hypothesis in teaching practice. However, empirical studies about cultivating morphological awareness in China are still rarely seen and fewer are applied to derivative teaching. Therefore, the author tries to investigate the effect of cultivating morphological awareness on Junior Students’ English derivative acquisition in order to help teachers find an effective method of vocabulary teaching.This thesis aims at conducting an empirical study around the following three specific research questions:1) What are the effects of cultivating morphological awareness on students’ explicit competence of derivative acquisition? 2) What are the effects of cultivating morphological awareness on students’implicit competence of derivative acquisition? 3) What are the effects of cultivating morphological awareness on students’spelling competence of derivative acquisition?Morphological awareness (MA) can be segmented into two aspects, respectively, explicit awareness and implicit awareness. Explicit competence is measured by the ability to identify base words within two-morpheme words. Implicit competence can be referred to as the ability of applying morphological rules to new words. According to Schmidt (1990), this paper defines spelling competence as learner’s subjective experience of drawing form-meaning mapping between the linguistic form and the meaning it carries. The research of explicit competence is based on the morpheme-based representation in lexicon morphological processing. The study of implicit competence is done with the whole-word representation in lexicon morphological processing. The spelling competence research is carried out with the guidance of noticing hypothesis. From morphological decomposition to whole-word processing, then to form-meaning mapping of derivatives, this represents a process that begins with identification, then develops to integration and lastly extends to manipulation, which constitutes the focus of this research specified by the three research questions respectively.The study is conducted by employing both quantitative and qualitative method. The quantitative research is conducted by the instrument of three tests. The research subject.134 Grade 3 Junior students from Zibo Yucai Middle School, includes 68 students in the control group and 66 students in the experiment group. The pre-test shows that the experiment group and the control group have no significant difference in vocabulary level test. Then in the experiment group, the subjects receive morphology-based vocabulary lessons, while the subjects in the control group are taught by traditional teaching method. At the end of the teaching experiment, the students of the two groups respectively take part in the morphological decomposition test, the whole-word processing test and the word spelling test. The data of these three tests were input into SPSS 16.0 and analyzed with the help of the Independent Samples T-test. The qualitative research is carried out with the form of interview and the interviewees were 6 students randomly selected from experiment group. The author recorded for the whole interview process.The major findings of the thesis are as follows:1) In the morphological decomposition test, the experiment group performs better than the control group and there exists a significant difference in the two groups (p=0.000). Therefore, the cultivating of the morphological awareness apparently improves the subjects’ competence to identify base words of two-morpheme words.2) In the whole-word processing test, the results indicate that there is an obvious significance in the two groups (p=0.000). That is to say, the cultivating of the morphological awareness can promote the subjects’competence of applying morphological structure rules into new words.3) In the word spelling test, the experiment group does not outperform the control group and no significant difference can be found between the two groups (p=0.367). It is clear that the cultivating of the morphological awareness cannot enhance the students’ competence of drawing from-meaning mapping between the linguistic form and meaning it carries.The pedagogical implications of the study are:1) Teachers should pay attention to the teaching of morphological decomposition, with the purpose to promote students’competence to identify base words within two-morpheme words.2) Teachers should consciously utilize the whole-word representation under the guidance of the morphological processing theory to facilitate students’ competence of applying morphological rules to new words.3) When acquiring new derivatives, students should learn to make use of the connection with other familiar words in the same morphological word family.Except for the above-mentioned, the study still has some limitations, such as the relatively small sample size, the test design, the limited time in word spelling test, etc. And the students’ learning style is not but should be taken into consideration. Therefore, the study needs further improvement in a more comprehensive and more elaborate manner.