The Influence of Derivational and Inflectional Morphological Awareness on the Writing of Undergraduate EFL Students: An Empirical Study

Abstract

This current study aimed to investigate the influence of derivational and inflectional morphological awareness on the writing of undergraduate students studying English as a Foreign Language. They were divided in to two groups and each group comprised 200 advanced EFL learners. Explicit morphological instructions were given to group two in the classroom for full one semester whereas group one wasn't given any kind of morphological knowledge. To collect data, exactly the same lists of word-formation on different morphological processes and their use in the writing samples were administered to both the groups. The main objective of this research was to examine the correlation between the morphological awareness and the EFL writing after testing learners' reflection on word-formation. Then it also tried to explore the difference between their performances to check whether the morphological instructions improved their writing or not. The findings stated that group two students always performed far better than group one and showed a strong understanding of word-formation structure while applying and manipulating in the morphological-instructed tasks. The formulated hypothesis-the teaching of explicit morphemic rules improves not only morphological awareness to a large extent but also grammatical, intralingual, lexical and syntactic awareness that results to enhance collaboratively EFL writing competence. A promising contribution of this current study to pedagogy was that explicit teaching of morphology improved writing to a concrete, large extent and revealed clearly that it must be introduced to EFL learners from the early education so that their writing skill can be developed effectively.