The relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge of Malay ESL learners at the Centre for Foundation Studies, IIUM /
Morphemes are the building blocks of lexical item. Due to this, the ability to identify and manipulate morphemes at the word level, or termed as morphological awareness, is said to be a good predictor to one's vocabulary knowledge. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the relationship betw...
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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Thesis |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Kuala Lumpur:
Kulliyyah of Islamic Revealed Knowledge and Human Sciences, International Islamic University Malaysia,
2013
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | Click here to view 1st 24 pages of the thesis. Members can view fulltext at the specified PCs in the library. |
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| Summary: | Morphemes are the building blocks of lexical item. Due to this, the ability to identify and manipulate morphemes at the word level, or termed as morphological awareness, is said to be a good predictor to one's vocabulary knowledge. Therefore, this study aims to investigate the relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge. To accomplish this, the Morphological Awareness Test (McBride-Chang, Wagner, Muse, Chow & Shu, 2005) and the Vocabulary Levels Test (Schmitt, Schmitt & Clapham, 2001) were administered to 100 Malay pre-university ESL learners. Modifications were made to the test of Morphological Awareness to better suit the students' language background. The Morphological Awareness Test is further divided into two subtests, the Morpheme Identification Test and the Morphological Structure Test, representing the analytic and synthetic aspects of morphological awareness. These two aspects of morphological awareness permit learners to use their metalinguistic ability of analysing and synthesizing the smallest linguistic unit known as morpheme at the word. The students' vocabulary level is determined from their scores on the Vocabulary Levels Test. The results reveal that the students have a relatively limited overall morphological awareness as well as vocabulary knowledge and this could have possibly contributed to the establishment of null association between the two. Apart from that, it is also found that the students' ability to form morphologically complex words is better than their ability to distinguish morphemes of the tested words. Although no statistical relationship is proven in this study, it is far too sweeping and early to disregard the potential that morphological awareness has towards expanding one's vocabulary threshold. Therefore, it is recommended that more research should be conducted in the Malaysian setting involving different groups of Malay ESL learners to further investigate vocabulary learning strategies in the language classroom so as to fully understand the actual correlation between the aforementioned variables. |
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| Item Description: | "A dissertation submitted in fulfilment of the requirement for the degree of Master of Human Sciences (Teaching of English as a Second Language)."--On t.p. |
| Physical Description: | xi, 95 leaves : ill. ; 30cm. |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-82). |