Morphological Knowledge and Learning a Foreign Language: A Case Study

Mahmoud Mobaraki^1, and Abolfazl Mosaffa Jahromi^2,

¹Linguistic Department, Faculty of Humanities, Jahrom University, Iran, Jahrom, P.O. Box: 74135111.

²Assistant Professor, Linguistic Department, Faculty of Humanities, Jahrom University, Iran, Jahrom, P.O. Box: 74135111

Cite this paper:
Mahmoud Mobaraki and Abolfazl Mosaffa Jahromi. Morphological Knowledge and Learning a Foreign Language: A Case Study. Journal of Linguistics and Literature. 2019; 3(1):1-4. doi: 10.12691/jll-3-1-1

Abstract

Linguistic knowledge about the structure of the words has all the necessary characteristics to be called meaningful learning by educational psychologists. The authors try to answer these research questions: Is there a meaningful correlation between teaching morphology, learning, memorizing and retrieval of English words on the part of Iranian students? Does teaching morphology help the students to understand how to use the words in proper syntactic situations? To answer the cited questions and to see how morphological knowledge helps students to learn a foreign language, the authors studied 180 students from Jahrom University, Iran who had to pass general English as their foreign language. The students were divided into experimental group and control group. After formal teaching English morphology to experimental group, by applying statistical methods such as Pearson Correlation and T-test on the students¡¯ scores, it reveals that meaningful teaching in morphology can help the students to learn new words easily and increase their vocabularies. Besides, it can help them to improve their syntactic knowledge.

Keywords:
meaningful teaching morphology inflection derivation syntactic knowledge

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