The predictive role of morphological awareness and productive vocabulary knowledge in L2 postgraduate students’ academic writing

Abstract

Studies have found that morphology awareness could assist writers to increase productive vocabulary (e.g. Green et al., 2003;McCutchen & Stull, 2015), reduce vocabulary errors (e.g. Karakas, 2012;Ririn, 2010), and produce complex sentence structures using various forms of words. Postgraduate students as second language users of English (L2) were found to experience lack of vocabulary and have difficulties in their academic writing. Researchers have been concentrating on examining the relationship of morphological awareness with vocabulary reading, reading comprehension, receptive vocabulary knowledge, and spelling; however, there is still a shortage of studies examining the relationship of morphological awareness with academic writing, particularly among L2 postgraduate students. Therefore, this study aims to examine the correlation of morphological awareness with academic writing and investigate the extent to which the dimensions of morphological awareness and productive vocabulary knowledge predict the success of postgraduate students' academic writing in an ESL context. The results showed that there was a significant correlation between morphological awareness and academic writing. The synthetic dimension of morphological awareness had a stronger contribution than the analytic dimension to the L2 postgraduate students' academic writing. The results also showed that learning and teaching morphology could bring benefits to L2 postgraduate students, allowing students to improve their productive writing skills and enabling them to produce texts and convey their ideas meaningfully.

The Effectiveness of a Structural-cum-Communicative Approach to Vocabulary Teaching

“…For example, McCutchen and Stull (2015) concluded that morphology awareness was useful in assisting writers to increase productive vocabulary; Asaad and Shabdin (2021) drew the conclusion that morphological awareness significantly correlated with academic writing.…”

“…vocabulary (McCutchen & Stull, 2015). Asaad and Shabdin (2021) observed that morphological awareness significantly correlated with academic writing, helping students to produce texts and convey ideas meaningfully. Vincy (2020) built in such elements in the supplementary teaching materials developed for the experimental group as contextual introduction of the target vocabulary; focusing on the form; pictorial representation of the meaning of the target word; most frequent derivatives of the word; and creating a means for emotional association with the word meaning.…”

An Analysis of the Significance of Vocabulary in Fostering ESL/EFL Students' Writing Skills: An Empirical Study

“…According to Cameron (2001: 72), developing a practical vocabulary is critical to learning a foreign language at the fundamental level. Besides, the capacity of L2 writers to choose the right word to convey their semantic intention will be improved as their vocabulary grows (McCutchen & Stull, 2015), cited in Qasem, H., Asaad, M., & Shabdin, A. A.…”

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

“…Many studies on vocabulary L2 have shown the importance of having adequate words that can be used in the target language productively [5][6][7][8][9]. College learners have different goals to succeed academically [10].…”