Receptive and Productive Vocabulary Size

30 ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure ”. In this definition, Carlisle is focusing on children’s abilities to distinguish and manipulate morphemes at the word level. She concerns on the early stage of the language acquisition experienced by the children especially in constructing and manipulating the words. Kuo and Anderson 2006 state that morphological awareness is the understanding of complex words as the combinations of meaningful smaller units which are including prefixes, suffixes, and roots. They focus on the elements of words in term of morphemes. Morphological awareness means that the students are able to know the meaning of complex words together with their language properties such as the base and suffixes. They also need to be able to construct and combine the elements together with the meaning they carry to form new words. Based on the definitions above, it can be concluded that there are two main definitions of morphological awareness. The first definition deals with the young learners‘ ability to differentiate the words within homophones. It is closely related to early acquisition of the language that the young learners acquire. The second definitions are related to the adult learners’ ability to know the words construction both in breaking down the elements or constructing the elements of the words. There are some perspectives to see the study of morphological awareness. The first perspective is to see the study of morphological awareness among young learners. The second perspective is to examine the study of morphological 31 awareness among adult learners. Most studies of morphological awareness among young learners talked about the children’s ability to recognize the sound. Meanwhile most of the studies of morphological awareness among adult learners talked about the learners’ ability to recognize the form and meaning. Tabatabei 2011 found that the instructional approach of morpheme or root word families in teaching vocabulary for ESL learners showed that the learners can develop their vocabulary better when vocabulary is taught by morphological analyses rather than through more traditional class instruction methods. Another study by Zhang and Koda 2011 revealed the contribution of morphological awareness and lexical inferring ability to L2 vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension among advanced EFL learners. The study revealed that morphological awareness contributed to L2 vocabulary knowledge directly and indirectly through the mediation of learners’ lexical inferring ability. Those studies regarded morphological awareness as the learners’ ability to recognize the form and meaning. It is should be noted that language learners may confuse morphology acquisition and morphological awareness. The concept of morphological awareness implies learners ’ use of meta-cognitive strategies of reflecting and manipulating word formation rules to derive the meaning of new words in the absence of communicative context. In other hand, the concept of morphology acquisition does not necessarily entail meta-cognitive strategies. Morphology acquisition merely means the cognitive abilities to use and comprehend