Significance of Morphology in English Language Learning

By: Theola Bancal and Jenny Rose Yarte

Introduction

This study investigates the importance of morphology in terms of learning English

language as morphology facilitates in several ways to master the language including

vocabulary, spelling, pronunciation, word cognition, fluency, text comprehension and reading

accuracy.

Morphology is the branch of linguistics (and one of the major components of grammar)

that studies word structures, especially in terms of morphemes. Morphemes, often defined as

the smallest linguistic pieces with a grammatical function. This definition is not meant to include

all morphemes, but it is the usual one and a good starting point. A morpheme may consist of a

word, such as hand, or a meaningful piece of a word, such as the -ed of looked, that cannot be

divided into smaller meaningful parts

The development and perception of English words are greatly influenced by morphology.

The morphemes that are comprised of root, stems, prefixes and suffixes that convey the

importance of words are essential to building a high English content that is induced to have an

immense vocabulary that helps to create new words and gives a firm structure of the English

dialect. The exact part of morphology differs with every dialect, contingent upon the word

arrangement forms utilized as a part of every dialect. It is not in any case sure that there is an

all-inclusive part of morphology that applies to all dialects (Libben&Jarema, 2004). Morphemes

contributes a lot in the English world as it constructs new words and new context out of well

known morphemes.
 As morphology affects the english language learning such as vocabulary, spelling,

pronunciation, word cognition, fluency, text comprehension, and reading accuracy you can

really see the influence of morphology on the English language learning and this research will

explain why.

First the vocabulary, if a person is to read books or in the middle of reading a book, and

that person read a specific word that he/she don’t understand, he/she tend to search for that

word in the dictionary to understand the word, and to research those words more thoroughly, It

will see that a single word has a lot of different meanings through the help of morphemes.

Plag (2003, pp. 9-10) discusses the fact that many words are made up of more than one

morpheme and that knowing the word’s form often involves an understanding of its inner

morphological structure. For example, respectful is composed of two morphemes: the stem

respect, which denotes a quality that pleases or delights the senses, and the suffix –ful, which

marks the word as an adjective and denotes having the quality specified in the stem.

The word respectful for an example, learners who are morphologically aware of the

word, understands that the base word respect, and its suffix – ful has its individual meanings,

when combined it creates the word respectful. And thus, they would understand words that have

ful in it. Like for example, beautiful, graceful, faithful and etc. And learners will also discover that

the words ending ful is usually adjectives. Bellomo (2009a) defines morphological analysis as

“the process of breaking down morphologically complex words into their constituent morphemes

(word meaning parts)” (p. 45). If knowledge of word form and meaning is important to

vocabulary composition, then it’s logical to think that those who are morphologically aware of

the morphemes are better equipped with a good vocabulary.

Morphology is useful when it comes to spelling, as morphology breaks down the words

into morphemes that an individual may find it easier to understand. For an example, magician
and emotion has a same end sound. Magic has a consonant letter, and typically when a word

ends with a consonant and is to be added with a suffix, its spelling wouldn’t be typically altered

and its base form will remain. And thus adding -ian on magic will be magician. And emote will be

emotion, and thus, one would know the spelling between both words. There is increasing

evidence that children use morphology to help their spelling from an early age (e.g., Casalis,

Deacon & Pacton, 2011;Pacton & Deacon, 2008;Sénéchal & Kearnan, 2007;Treiman & Cassar,

1996;Treiman & Cassar, 1997;Treiman & Kessler, 2014). Kemp (2006) examined how 7-year-

old English speakers spelled the middle /z/ of one-morpheme words such as busy and two-

morpheme words such as noisy, which is derived from noise. Often it is morphemic knowledge

that is responsible for the strategic spelling of unknown words (Nunes et al. 2006).

In the last few decades it has been frequently shown that familiarity with morphemic
patterns helps children to reasonably guess the meanings of unfamiliar words and is a
powerful tool in vocabulary acquisition (see, e.g., Bertram et al., 2000)

Morphology also provides reading strategies for correctly decoding and spelling
unfamiliar words (Verhoeven and Perfetti, 2003, 2011).\

Morphological awareness improves with age and in each subsequent grade is more
predictive of both reading and spelling achievement in children exposed to different
orthographies (e.g., Mann and Singson, 2003; Berninger et al., 2010; Casalis et al., 2011)
Morphological awareness usually predicts unique variance in addition to phonological
awareness and has different degrees of association with word recognition (and spelling)
in different scripts (McBride-Chang et al., 2003, 2005).

Knowledge of derived words, in particular, may contribute to both reading and spelling
achievement in older children, such as 6th graders (see, e.g., for Dutch, Rispens et
al., 2008)

Overall, access to morphemic constituents of words fosters reading and spelling

performance in the course of literacy acquisition in several languages that vary for
morphological richness and orthographic transparency (Verhoeven and Perfetti, 2011).

If knowledge of word form and meaning are important to vocabulary acquisition, then it seems logical
that those who are more gifted with regard to morphological awareness are better equipped to grow
their vocabulary.

Students who understand how words are formed by combining prefixes,

suffixes, and roots tend to have larger vocabularies and better reading
comprehension than peers without such knowledge and skills (Prince, 2009).
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 Morphology is useful when it comes to spelling, as morphology breaks down the words into syllables
that an individual may find it easier to understand. For an example, magician and emotion has a same end
sound. Magic has a consonant letter, and typically when a word ends with a consonant and is to be added with
a suffix, its spelling wouldnt be typically altered. And its base form will remain, and thus adding -ian on magic
will be magician. And emote will be emotion, and thus, one would know the spelling between both words.

Baka iaask sayo ng prof mo na "talaga ba? Kapag consonant yung nasa last part eh di na magchange? What if vowel?
Like, for an example use"
Ito sabihin mo, "well in that case sir, use can be added with a suffix of -ful and be the word "useful" without altering its
base form. As the last vowel which is e doesnt drop its sound.