MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS AND ITS RELATIONSHIP TO VOCABULARY SIZE AND MORPHOLOGICAL COMPLEXITY AMONG IRANIAN EFL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

This research examined the relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary size in Iranian EFL learners. The participants were 60 senior university students from Azad University of Qaemshahr majoring in English Language Teaching. Morphological awareness test and vocabulary level test were used. Descriptive statistics, reliability measures and correlation coefficients were reported. The results of this study have shown that students performed better in analysis section than what they did in synthesis section but the differences between them were low and there was a high correlation between analytic and synthetic knowledge so that analytic knowledge could highly predict synthetic knowledge and vice versa. The effect of synthetic knowledge on morphology was higher than analytic knowledge but the latter was better than the former in wider words range. Also, the findings have shown that students had medium awareness of analytic and synthetic knowledge but vocabulary level of the students was low. The students performed better in suffix section than prefix. There was a significant relationship between the students’ morphological awareness and vocabulary size. Moreover, morphological awareness didn’t differentiate between the students’ performance on complex words and simple words.