The morphological and morphophonemic awareness of college-preparation ESL learners: An integrated study

The limited research on the morphological and morphophonemic awareness of learners of English as a Second Language has emphasized their problems with Latinate derivatives as purely phonological problems and focused on derivatives as isolated items in the learners' lexica.;My empirical study investigated the morphological and morphophonemic awareness of 32 Grade 12 Cantonese-speaking ESL learners and a comparison group of 32 Grade 12 native speakers of English in the Lower Mainland. The participants were enrolled in regular content area programs in preparation for post-secondary education. Both groups completed language background questionnaires and another questionnaire which assessed their awareness of the different associations between morphologically related words. They also completed tests involving Listening, Pronunciation, Word Analysis, and Semantic Rating of Word Pairs. The tests examined the subjects' phonological, morphological, orthographic, and semantic representations of morphologically related words. The fundamental assumption was that these were dimensions of the learners' lexical competence. On the basis of psycholinguistic evidence, subjects were assumed to associate derivatives with their bases in their mental lexica.;The hypotheses investigated in the study were that the following strategies would be predominant in the performance of the ESL subjects, (i) the incorporation of base-word pronunciation in the phonological representations of Latinate derivatives in aural recognition; (ii) the incorporation of base-word pronunciation in the production of Latinate derivatives; (iii) suffix deletion without spelling change in base-word abstraction from derivatives with non-obvious suffixes; and (iv) the incorporation of base-word pronunciation in the perception and production of obvious-suffix Latinate derivatives based on the perceived semantic relatedness between morphologically related words.;The first three hypotheses were confirmed. The fourth hypothesis was not confirmed; the spellings of derivatives were used by ESL subjects more as cues for pronunciation than for decoding meanings. The differences in performance between the two groups in the Listening, Pronunciation, and Word Analysis Tests and part of the Semantic Rating of Word Pairs Test were statistically significant. Error types were discussed and accounted for from a psycholinguistic perspective. The results are to be interpreted as preliminary conclusions due to the restricted test samples used and the small population studied. However, the findings have practical significance and warrant further research.;Current theories regarding English morphophonemics are discussed. Some suggestions for classroom techniques for raising morphological and morphophonemic awareness among learners are made, on the basis of evidence from psycholinguistic research on word access, recognition, retrieval, and association.