Investigating the impact of derivational morphology in foreign language acquisition: A case study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.24200/jonus.vol7iss2pp184-201Abstract
Background and Purpose: Second language (L2) learners have been observed making generation errors, i.e., derivational morphology, in the prospects of learning another language by translating it into their mother tongue. This research has studied these errors in L2 regarding derivational morphology.
Methodology: This study was designed as descriptive research, using a quantitative approach to collect data. The respondents in this research are a total of 100 undergraduates who volunteered to take part, comprising 50 from the second semester, and 50 from the fourth semester who majored in French, and had been chosen using a purposive sampling method. The current study contained an expanded instrument that included each of the four sentences from each of the fourfold or more distractors, comprising 108 items. The affectability of learners to the use of these structures in an unfavourable syntactic situation was tested by crossing derivationally related suffixed shapes with their bases. Data obtained from the 108 item questionnaires was analysed inferentially using ANOVA and t-test.
Findings: Results showed that learners were dissatisfied with the presence or absence of postfixes, implying that generation errors are a problem of performance rather than competence.
Contributions: The current study discovered a gap between the creation of defined and curved structures, confirming phonetic hypotheses that differentiate these two morphological mechanisms. Moreover, this study suggested that the root structures and inferred frames are vulnerable to the area of an incidental postfix and to the nonattendance of a requisite one. Effects are greater at higher levels, suggesting that syntactic knowledge starts to improve in advanced learners.
Keywords: Derivational morphology, language interference, bilingualism, translation, language teaching.
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