A Study On The Correlation Between Learners’ Derivational Knowledge And Their English Writing In Senior High School

The morphological knowledge is a critical component of language learning and has received considerable attention from researchers.Although an increasing body of evidence suggests that morphological knowledge is associated with language acquisition,such as vocabulary size and reading comprehension,there are still few studies to investigate the interrelation between derivational knowledge and learners’ writing.Therefore,the purposes of the study are 1)to test whether different aspects of word derivational knowledge correlate to foreign learners’ writing proficiency,2)to explore this relationship is the same or different for learners of different language proficiency levels and 3)to investigate the contribution of derivational aspects to students’ writing in senior high school.On the basis of the information processing theory and the theoretical model of writing,the author carries out the study.The participants are 83 students of Jing Tai No.2 senior high school.Subjects from different grades included 37 third graders and 46 first graders,who are required to finish one writing task as well as nine derivational knowledge measures.The writing topic is selected from the reference book for college entrance examination and the nine derivational knowledge tests referenced to Leontjev,Huhta and M?ntyl?’s(2016)study.After the analysis of experiment data,the results firstly demonstrate that the participants’ performance on all derivational knowledge measures positively correlates with their writing proficiency at both grade levels.Specifically,the relationship is different for the students in different grades.Furthermore,the results of Linear Regressions reveal that the grammar recognition task,affix elicitation task,non-word affix elicitation task and free production task strongly predict learners’ writing proficiency.Finally,the acquisition and frequency of using affixes are discussed by analyzing subjects’ writing samples.The results show that some factors might be responsible for the affix order of students’ acquisition,such as teachers’ instruction,frequency of affixes and frequency of words that contain a particular affix.The implications of the study lie in following aspects: firstly,word derivational knowledge plays an important role in learners’ English writing performance;secondly,it enriches the present empirical study of second language acquisition and is helpful for L2 teaching and study.