| Affix knowledge which is an important part of vocabulary knowledge plays a significant role in broadening second language learners’ word knowledge and improving their reading ability.The scholar Nagy(1993)holds the opinion that whether one has English affix knowledge will decide the level of their reading ability and the level of language proficiency.Affix knowledge is very important both to foreign language learners and teachers.For learners,affix knowledge helps them understand materials containing large number of new words and also help them improve their ability of analyzing or using words,so that their vocabulary especially derivatives are enlarged;for English teachers,mastering a lot of affix knowledge is useful to instruct students to guess and remember words by comparing words being learned with words having been learned.What’s more,teachers also can use their affix knowledge to classify and systematize the word knowledge which they plan to teach so that students can understand and remember them well.Linguists have begun to do theoretical study on affix knowledge since 1960 s.Knowing the development of affix knowledge has great significance to researchers,teachers and students,since it may reveal the rule of affix acquisition and the function on reading.Researchers abroad have done a lot of study on affix acquisition to native speakers,while scholars at home have paid attention to this topic just in recent ten years.Although previous researches have got great achievements,they just investigate the general condition of affix acquisition and there are many limitations on experiment designs,research objects and test words so a full analysis is needed.Given this,this paper increase the number and broaden the range of test affixes to reveal the rule of affix acquisition of Chinese English learners and may have some implications to English teaching especially to vocabulary teaching.This paper tries to investigate three questions:(1)What’s characteristics of Chinese English learners on dimensions of recognition,understanding and word-formation? Are there significant differences among these three dimensions?(2)Is the classification of difficulty level for affixes formulated by Nation(2001)suitable for Chinese English learners?(3)Whether learners having different English levels also have different affix knowledge? Does the second language level have influence on affix acquisition?The research subjects are 114 English learners from Lin Fen,Shan Xi province.They are divided as three groups: group one are 32 Grade three students from No.3 Middle School;group two are 34 non-English major students from Lin Fen College;group three are 48 English major students from Shan Xi Normal University.This paper will test 40 affixes containing 15 prefixes and 25 suffixes which come from Nation’s affix table including 5levels according to the degree of how hard learners understand the affix.The author extracts 8affixes from each level and tests them on three dimensions(recognition,understanding and word-formation).After collecting data,the author used Excel 2016 and the social statistics software SPSS19.0 to analyze them.The conclusions based on the data analysis conclude:(1)There are significant differences among three dimensions of affix acquisition.The sequence of affix acquisition from easy to difficult is: recognition,understanding and word-formation;(2)The classification of difficulty level formulated by Nation is basically suitable for Chinese English learners on dimensions of understanding and word-formation,but the dimension of recognition isn’t suitable for Chinese English learners;(3)Learners having different English levels also have different affix knowledge and affix knowledge increase with the development of the second language level.The significance of this paper can be summarized as four aspects:(1)Most previous researches are lack of representativeness because the number of affix they test is low or the scope is not wide enough,so this paper will increase the affix number to 40.(2)Only few studies contrast the different dimensions of affix such as the comparison between understanding and word-formation but according to Nation(2001),the affix recognitionwhich means the ability of distinguishing the affix from the base word should also be studied.This paper will analyze the three dimensions of affix acquisition.(3)The relationship between affix acquisition and the second language level is a valuable topic which deserves to be studied.Previous studies about this topic get different conclusions so further researches are necessary.(4)On the aspect of practice,this paper may have some illuminations or indications on English teaching especially on vocabulary teaching. |
