Morphological Awareness of Grade 8 Students in Caraga Region

Morphological awareness is defined as the ability to use the knowledge of word formation rules and the pairings between sounds and meanings (Kuo& Anderson, 2006; Al Farsi, 2008). The aim of the study is to assess morphological awareness as a learning strategy for promoting learners vocabulary size. Two key concepts of morphological awareness will be studied: analytic and synthetic word formation. The results are expected to provide insightful evidence of how to improve vocabulary instruction in the secondary level. To answer the present studys question of morphological awareness, a widely used test is adapted to the purpose of the study: Morphological Test with its subtests (analysis and synthesis). To answer the research question concerning the degree of the students morphological knowledge, Spearmans rho is run on the data obtained from the Morpheme Identification Test and the Morphological Structure Test. The findings demonstrate that the students overall morphological awareness is somewhat low (66 %) with a considerable variation among the results. The students perform better with inflectional affixes than derivational affixes, which is consistent with the literature that indicates that the acquisition of inflection is ahead of acquisition of derivation (Carlisle and Stone, 2003). The results also reveal that the students perform better in the analysis section than they do in synthesis section. However, the results also show a floor effect in the synthesis test with eleven students scoring the minimal score of 0 %. This suggests that students are not able to use the parallel sentence and the morphological structure of previously encountered words to produce new words. In addition, synthesis requires more advanced skills than analysis according to Blooms taxonomy- cognitive domain. The analytic aspect of morphological awareness is subsequent to synthetic aspects (Arnoff and Fudeman, 2005, Mc-Bride-Chang et al. , 2005). Taking this fact altogether with the students linguistic level in the present study can explicate students lower performance in the synthesizing morphological structure.