The academic paper titled The Influence of Derivational and Inflectional Morphological Awareness on the Writing of Undergraduate EFL Students: An Empirical Study focuses on the impact of morphological awareness on the writing abilities of advanced English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners. The primary research question investigates whether explicit instruction in derivational and inflectional morphology enhances the writing competence of EFL students.
The purpose of the study is to determine the correlation between morphological awareness and EFL writing proficiency, specifically examining how explicit morphological instruction influences students' ability to form and use words correctly in writing. The study is designed to assess whether morphological knowledge improves students' grammatical, lexical, and syntactic awareness, thereby enhancing their overall writing skills.
Methodologically, the study involves two groups of 200 fourth-year undergraduate Saudi students. One group received explicit instruction in morphology over a semester, while the other did not. Both groups were tasked with word-formation exercises involving various morphological processes, including derivation, inflection, internal change, and suppletion. The study analyzed the students' ability to form words correctly and use them in sentences, with data being collected through seven morphology tasks adapted from established linguistic frameworks.
The key findings of the study indicate that the group with explicit morphological instruction performed significantly better than the group without such instruction. The students who were taught morphological rules were more accurate in word formation and exhibited greater confidence in applying these rules in their writing. The study also found that explicit instruction led to a decrease in errors related to overgeneralization, morphophonemic unawareness, and lexical category incomprehension.
In conclusion, the study emphasizes the importance of teaching morphological rules explicitly to improve EFL students' writing skills. The results suggest that incorporating morphology into EFL curricula can significantly enhance students' ability to produce correct and varied lexical forms, ultimately leading to better writing proficiency. The study calls for further research into other morphological processes and their impact on language learning and pedagogy.