The Impact of Morphological Awareness Intervention in Enhancing L2 Postgraduate Students’ Productive Vocabulary Breadth

Abstract

The significance of vocabulary knowledge in academic development and having a sufficient vocabulary in language learning cannot be overstated. Research has shown that postgraduate students studying English as a second language (L2) lack vocabulary and require improving it. This research study was conducted to investigate the role of morphological awareness and its relation to productive vocabulary breadth and explore the function of teaching L2 postgraduate students in intervention for improving their productive vocabulary breadth. Thirty L2 postgraduate participants were involved in an intervention. The intervention included 11 sessions of morphological awareness instructions. The students’ morphological awareness was tested using the Morphological Identification Test (MIT) and the Morphological Structure Awareness Test (MSAT), while productive vocabulary breadth was tested using the Productive Vocabulary Level Test (PVLT). A significant relationship was found between morphological awareness and productive vocabulary breadth. The synthetic aspect of morphological awareness was more closely related to the participants’ productive vocabulary breadth than the analytic aspect. The morphological awareness intervention was effective and beneficial in increasing the students’ productive vocabulary breadth. The results may indicate the benefits of teaching and learning morphology to L2 postgraduate students, especially for effective vocabulary building.

Using Personalized Learning for Developing Primary School Pupils’ English Morphological Skills

“…Morphological awareness depends on analytic and synthetic aspects. Analytic morphology focuses on breaking words into morphemes, while synthetic morphology focuses on derivations and word formation (Asaad et al,2022). Morphological awareness facilitates students' understanding and retrieving of English vocabularies that include different morphemes (Jiang & Kuo,2019).…”

“…Thus, it is recommended that morphology instruction be introduced to middle school students since the textbooks focus on academic language (Goodwin et al, 2017). Asaad et al (2022) investigated the effect of derivational morphology instruction on productive vocabulary breadth. Participants were 30 postgraduate students in Malaysia who received an EFL morphological awareness intervention for 11 sessions.…”

“…The checklist was designed according to research mentioned in the review of literature and studies, like Asaad et al (2022) 2023), Wahid & Farooq (2019), and Zhang & Zou ( 2020).…”

“…Developing students' skills of word forming helps them in deriving different words from the same word, consequently they can guess the meaning of unfamiliar words (Farghal & Jaber, 2017). Constructing new words through combining morphemes is a strategy used in vocabulary teaching (Asaad et al,2022). Morphological instruction is essential for vocabulary learning and reading comprehension (Lo & Bunch-Crump, 2017).…”

Dynamics of Content Knowledge: Learned from Indonesian Arabic Teachers

“…Then Mu'jamiyah (lexical) knowledge also significantly influenced Arabic skills since it studied about vocabularies [18]. From these studies, Balaghah was identified as the most challenging aspect in Arabic, followed by Nahwu and Shorof [19]. Balaghah, which encompasses Arabic semantics and rhetoric, involves the understanding of the meanings of words, their usages, and the ability to express ideas eloquently and persuasively.…”