THE IMPACT OF TEACHING ENGLISH MORPHOLOGICAL RULES TO NON-ENGLISH MAJORS AT CENTRAL TRANSPORT COLLEGE NO.3

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.