Awareness of Derivational Morphology and its Influence on Vocabulary Retention

Abstract

Recent brain imaging studies (e.g. Paradis 2009) have confirmed that remembering foreign language words seems to be subserved by the left brain hemisphere, in contrast to the ability to make use of L2 vocabulary in real communication, which appears to be processed in the right hemisphere and represents the learner’s procedural knowledge. Consequently, acquisition of lexical items and their remembering are not the same processes since acquisition comprises both receptive and productive vocabulary usage. This chapter concentrates on vocabulary retention only. Its aim is to look at the role of explicit metacognitive instruction in derivational morphology in remembering English vocabulary. Since the awareness of word structure represents declarative knowledge, it may be assumed that it could be helpful in memorizing lexical items, which is the process subserved by the same type of knowledge. What is more, understanding word derivation engages more complex cognitive processing than just listing English words and their translations. Thus, there seems to be more chance for the learners to remember vocabulary better, as the use of memory and cognitive strategies had been long ago proved effective in the language learning process (Oxford 1990). The learners from the experimental group (18–19 years old high school students) were explicitly taught affixes, their meaning, and what parts of speech they form. Students were engaged in tasks that allowed for word manipulation and developed their analytical abilities. In the control group derivational morphology was not introduced. After the treatment, both groups took part in a vocabulary test. Regrettably, data analysis revealed no significant differences in vocabulary retention between the groups.