Concept of Morphological Awareness

33 synthesis aspect. The syntactic aspect is morpheme identification awareness, while the synthesis aspect is morphological structure awareness. 1 Morpheme Identification Awareness First aspect of morphological awareness is the morpheme identification awareness. McBridge 2005 defines morpheme identification awareness as “the ability to distinguish different meanings across homophones”. She demonstrated this skill by giving example when a language learner understands that the flower in flowerpot is represented by a plant with petals as opposed to a sack of white powder flour. Another example is when the language learner can differentiate the sound of the word dead in dead body to the sound of the word debt in a spoken language. Here the emphasis is what the learner can develop for his vocabulary acquisition based on his acquired word in term of homophone, and how the learner can differentiate the homophones. However, this current study uses another operational definition of morpheme identification awareness. The previous definition is related to definition of morpheme as sound, while this study defines morpheme as smallest meaningful unit of language in the form of word. Hence, morpheme identification awareness in this current study is the ability to distinguish different meanings by examining the components of the word construction. It is the learners’ ability to figure out the meaning of words by examining the components which construct the words. 34 2 Morphological Structure Awareness The second aspect of morphological awareness is morphological structure awareness. It is the ability to create new meanings by making use of familiar morphemes Berko in McBridge, 2005. He studies this ability in which children’s grammatical knowledge illustrates this skill. A child who understands that the famous concept of greater than one wug is represented by the word wugs, involving two morphemes, demonstrates morphological structure awareness skill. This particular example reflects inflectional knowledge of morphology. Similarly, Chang, Wagner, Muse Chow, 2005 define morphological structure awareness as the ability of the learners to make use the linguistic knowledge to derive new meaning. It is similar to the previous definition as the aspects cover the language elements and new meaning. It relates the receptive skills to be performed as productive skills. The learners who are able to know the concept of present participle will recognize that the present participles are derived from present verbs plus –ing. Thus, they can produce new meaning of the words that are recognized as present verbs to be added –ing to make it as present participles. In addition, since present participles can transform into adjectives, the learners can also produce new words as adjectives from other present participles e.g. confusing, amazing, boring. Morphological structure awareness requires complete awareness to construct new meaning and to confirm whether the words exist in English. For instance, one may construct new word derived from the words cactus by adding –es to the word. So the word is cactuses. However the new word is incorrect since cactus cannot be added –es instead of cacti. In other 35 words, the learners should be equipped by sufficient knowledge of the morphemes to be able to construct new words correctly. To sum up, morphological structure is closely related to the ability to construct new words from the morphemes the learners have learnt. It requires the learners to know affixes inflections and derivations together with their meaning and use. The ability requires the learner to perform productive skills from the knowledge they get through receptive language activities e.g. reading and listening.

c. Importance of Morphological Awareness

Morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge are often discussed in the specific context of literacy learning as well. For example, Carlisle 2000 found individual differences in morphological awareness for third- and fifth-grade students to be uniquely predictive of their reading comprehension. Based on this study, morphological awareness is beneficial for the prediction of the reading comprehension. More specifically, morphological awareness will improve the ability to predict the unfamiliar words by examining the structure of the word. This will influence the reading comprehension as the more vocabulary the students know, the more reading comprehension they will get. Another study of second-grade readers by Nagy, Berninger, Abbott, Vaughan, Vermeulen 2006 also demonstrated that morphological awareness uniquely predicted reading comprehension in children, although not in fourth graders at risk for writing difficulties. 36 Fowler and Liberman 1995 showed that word reading was significantly correlated with tasks of morphological awareness, even controlling for age and vocabulary level, among second to fourth graders. Their study focuses on the advantage of morphological awareness in reading especially in elementary level. In addition, a study by Carlisle and Nomanbhoy 1993 also found that a measure of morphological production significantly predicted word reading in first graders, once phonological awareness was statistically controlled. Similarly to the previous result of the research, Carlisle and Nomanbhoy stated that the controlled phonological awareness is useful for elementary language learner as it can be used to predict the word reading. The last study also found that morphological production measured in first grade was significantly related to word recognition and reading comprehension in second grade, with phonological awareness controlled as well Carlisle, 1995. Those three studies show that the morphological awareness is beneficial for the reading as it has significant relationship and can be the way to predict the word reading, especially for the elementary language level. More specifically, morphological awareness is useful both in receptive and productive skills. In receptive skills, morphological awareness is mainly useful for guessing the meaning from its structures. In productive skills, morphological awareness is beneficial especially to construct new words.