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morphological awareness. In addition, it is also important to present the scope of the morphological awareness in which the learners may experience in their
language acquisition. The importance of the morphological awareness related to previous studies is then presented to give understanding on its significance to
language acquisition.
a. Concept of Morphological Awareness
Morphological awareness refers to the learners ’ knowledge of morphemes
and morphemic structure, allowing them to reflect and manipulate morphological structure of words Carlisle Stone, 2003. Awareness of inflectional form is
gained earlier than awareness of derivational forms. It can be assumed that language learners can more easily master the inflectional forms as inflectional
forms do not change the part of speech and are relatively few. In other hand, the language learners master derivational form latter as derivations change the part of
speech and there is significant number of derivational forms in English. McBridge 2005 defines morphological awareness as “an awareness of
access to the meaning and structure of morphemes in relation to words”. In other words, he defines morphological awareness as the conscious thought and the
ability to form new meaning and structure in its relation to the words construction. The language learners should be critical to notice what words can be formed
together into larger unit and what a unit may consist of. Differently, Carlisle
1995 defines morphological awareness as “children’s “conscious awareness of the morphemic structure of words and their
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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
