Productive strategies for morphologically complex words in Spanish speaking learners of English

Abstract

Morphological awareness refers to the ability to apply processes of inflection and derivation to lexemes in order to produce forms which are syntactically and semantically appropriate for the expression of the selected meaning. In the eld of second language learning, morphologically complex words like uncomfortable and underachieving are an area of continuing interest for two main reasons. Firstly, in language use a significant proportion of the words encountered will have undergone some kind of morphological process, which may be inflectional or derivational, and so learners will deal with morphologically complex words frequently. Secondly, achieving a greater understanding of how learners acquire morphological competence can allow for insights into how they might be taught more effectively. The objective of this study is to analyze the use and effectiveness of the cognitive strategies used by three Mexican learners of English as a Foreign Language at university level to produce morphologically complex words in tasks of derivation in context. While they completed these tasks they produced a verbal report of their cognitive processes. The morphological strategies observed in this way were classified in relational, syntactic and distributional, following the models described in Tyler y Nagy (1987) and Petrush (2006). We also identified and categorized non-morphological processes as textual and contextual. Among the more relevant results we found a clear role for relational morphological strategies and a lesser, though still important, role for textual and contextual strategies. The results suggest that effectiveness in task resolution depends on the level of difficulty of the task as well as strategies which focus on the text and the semantic context. For teaching practice, they suggest the importance of including learning activities which foster the explicit analysis of processes of morphological derivation, alongside with the identification of textual cues which would facilitate the appropriate selection of morphemes, especially for students in B1 and B2.