MEASURING MORPHOLOGICAL KNOWLEDGE AMONG SECONDARY SCHOOL STUDENTS: IMPLICATIONS FOR EFFECTIVE VOCABULARY ACQUISITION

The aim of this study is to investigate the morphological knowledge among ESL secondary school students. As English text has many complex words, and understanding them can be problematic to ESL struggling students. Thus, having knowledge of morphology is deemed vital for their vocabulary acquisition. 110 ESL secondary school students’ morphology knowledge was assessed based on their analysis and synthesis ability in this study. The Morphemic Analysis Test was employed to measure the students’ ability to decode morphological units in English complex words. Opinion Survey questionnaire was used to identify whether the students are interested to learn a new strategy that can aid them in learning morphological units. Ttest and descriptive statistics were employed to report the results of the study. The results indicated that the students have limited knowledge of morphology as they lack the ability to analyse morphologically complex words. However, the students expressed their interest to learn the proposed strategy to learn morphological units. This finding implicates that there is a need for a strategy on learning morphological units that can facilitate students’ vocabulary acquisition. The study thus recommends morphemic analysis strategy so that students can acquire vocabulary effectively by unlocking the meaning of complex words.