How influential is the knowledge of Morphology

How influential is the knowledge of Morphology

in the EFL classroom?

EFL teachers who consider the elements involving both linguistic and communicative competence in a classroom setting tend to understand more the challenges faced by students when learning a language. Some teachers think that the nature of some mistakes comes from the interference from the L1. Others might interpret mistakes as the lack of vocabulary of the target language. In any case, the important point is that teachers have to help their students to overcome these problems. One way is by applying the knowledge that morphology provides regarding the way language works, the formation of words, and the different needs of words’ categories. Apart from providing understanding of the nature of the language system, morphological knowledge can support EFL teachers to assist their students in the process of vocabulary growth and spelling improvement.

Vocabulary learning and teaching is a central activity in the EFL classroom. It is widely recognized that there is a strong relationship between an individual’s vocabulary size and his/her general language proficiency. One potential vocabulary learning strategy is the use of morphological knowledge. Morphological knowledge may be helpful for the learners when trying to deal with the meanings of new words. Understanding the meaning of prefixes, suffixes, and roots improves the comprehension of words or a text. The manipulation of affixes can impact the part of speech that a word denotes. Having this knowledge enhances text comprehension as well. Specifically, students can be taught strategies to analyze words according to their affixes and roots. As a result, they may be able to recognize an unfamiliar word simply by identifying the suffixes or prefixes and the remaining base word or root. For example, a free morpheme is an element that can stand alone within a sentence, such as dog, work, look, and fox. A bound morpheme is a grammatical unit that never occurs by itself such as, prefixes and suffixes which are attached to free morphemes. Adding the bound morpheme (s) to the free morpheme (dog) changes the noun's number; the addition of the -ed to (work) changes tense. Students who understand how words are formed by combining prefixes, suffixes, and roots tend to have larger vocabularies and better reading comprehension than peers without such knowledge and skills (Prince 2009 ). Therefore, the knowledge of morphology can be applied in en EFL class in order to increase their vocabulary.

In addition to its importance to vocabulary growth, the knowledge of morphology can also be found to be a great contributor to improve spelling. Morphology demonstrates how words can be divided into roots and stems, which contribute to spelling of words. Common spelling mistakes that I have identified in my teaching practice include: silent letters such as “h” or “e” in “white”; prefixes and suffixes, “un”, “less” which change the meaning of a word; and past tense, “-ed” endings and irregular endings “kept”. By drawing my students’ attention to the inflectional and derivational morphology, I can help them identify the common part of words, to analyze words into their morphemes, to check for affixes and roots, and to realize that the spelling of bases and the spelling of inflections typically remain unchanged regardless of the lexical context. Another activity that can be applied is dictation. I can dictate the text in phrases; then my students can be asked to spell the target words and justify their answers in a guided participatory context. In this way, they can have some opportunities to find the semantic relationships between base word and their suffixes or affixes and also to reflect on the spelling patterns corresponding to the analyzed morphemes. A student, who doubts about spelling

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