Focus: This study primarily focuses on examining the correlational relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary size knowledge of Saudi EFL learners at King Khalid University.
Purpose and Scope: The aim of this study was to investigate the level of vocabulary knowledge and morphological awareness Saudi EFL learners at King Khalid University possess, and to determine if there is a statistically significant correlation between these two variables.
Methodology: The study employed a correlational research design. The participants included 67 male English-major students from King Khalid University. Two instruments were used to gather data: Nation's (1990) Vocabulary Level Test to measure vocabulary size, and the Morphological Awareness Test adopted from Alsalamah (2011) which consists of the Morphological Structure Test and Morpheme Identification Test.
Key Findings:
- The students' overall vocabulary size was 4686 word families, falling within the 2,000-5,000 word level range.
- The students' performance in the Morphological Awareness Test was relatively low at 65.6%, with better performance in the Morphological Structure Test compared to the Morpheme Identification Test.
- There was no statistically significant correlation found between morphological awareness and vocabulary size of the students.
Conclusions: The results suggest an urgent need for explicit teaching of morphological knowledge and vocabulary learning strategies to help students enlarge their vocabulary size. Introducing the Academic Word List is also recommended to prepare students for academic vocabulary they will encounter in their studies. Further research with larger samples and additional variables is needed to gain more insights into the relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge of EFL learners in the Saudi context.