| dc.description.abstract | The study done for and reported in this M.A. thesis was designed to investigate the
impact of teaching morphological rules (abbreviated to MRs) to non-English majors at
Central Transport College No.3 in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam — those who have
trouble in learning English words. Specifically, the study aims to investigate which
way of studying vocabulary work better for the non-English majors: consciously
learning the prefixes and suffixes involved in the English words that I — the teacher
and the researcher, selected, or just incidentally learning new words without using the
knowledge of affixation. The study’s experiment was carried out over 12 weeks, with
only 10 minutes out of each of the 50-minute classes per week. A total of 50 students
took part in this experiment in which the students were organized into two groups:
one memorized English words using knowledge gained from their teacher’s affixation
lectures, while the other studied without any instruction about affixation. The goal of
the post-test was (i) to determine how the students acquired the affix patterns of
English words and expanded their vocabulary and (ii) to investigate how different the
experimental group (abbreviated to the EG) is from the control group (abbreviated to
the CG). The assumption was that basic knowledge of commonly used affixes would
help the EG’s students learn new words much faster and avoid looking them up
repeatedly. The study’s results indicated that knowing a number of English affixes and
morphological rules did help the students enlarge their vocabulary. By addressing the
benefits of explicitly communicating the selected English affixes and morphological
rules to the student subjects, the study has contributed to the field's literature. | vi |
