suffix knowledge: acquisition and applications

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Suffix knowledge: Acquisition and applications Jeremy Ward * , Jitlada Chuenjundaeng Suranaree University of Technology, Amphoe Muang, Nakhon Ratchasima 30000, Thailand Received 18 September 2008; received in revised form 26 January 2009; accepted 28 January 2009 Abstract The purpose of this study is to investigate L2 learners’ knowledge of complex word part analysis (‘‘word-building), with particular reference to two issues: suffix acquisition and to the use of word families as a counting tool. Subjects were two groups of EAP students in a Thai university. Results suggest that (1) the use of word families as a counting tool leads to highly misleading conclusions, especially with less proficient learners; (2) affix learning proceeds on the basis of stem to derived form and not vice versa; (3) the acquisition of stem + suffix occurs with certain particular suffixes before others; (4) such word-building schemas may depend on frequency of exposure. Implications for teaching are discussed. Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Keywords: Word morphology; Academic vocabulary; Suffix acquisition; Word families 1. Purposes of the study: word-building In EFL vocabulary research, investigations of the L2 learner’s mental lexicon have commonly distinguished between breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge (how many words are known and how well) and mor- phological knowledge has usually figured as one aspect of depth of word knowledge ( Nation, 2001; Read, 2000; Richards, 1976). Issues investigated include the extent of learner’s affix knowledge and how it is related to overall vocabulary size (Mochizuki and Aizawa, 2000; Schmitt and Meara, 1997); how well learners are able to mobilize word morphology knowledge for productive language use (Schmitt and Zimmerman, 2002); whether affix knowledge can show an acquisition order (Mochizuki and Aizawa, 2000); the construct of word as in word family ( Gardner, 2007); how to classify affixes for teaching purposes (Bauer and Nation, 1993); and how word formation knowledge affects EFL students’ reading ability (e.g. Mirhassani and Toosi, 2000). The purpose of the present study is to investigate EFL learners’ knowledge of what we will call word-building. By word-building we mean using morphological analysis of words for purposes of learning or understanding or remembering what they mean: what Nation (2001, p. 278) refers to as the ‘‘word part strategy for learning complex new words. The work pertains to two main issues – first, word families (because they depend on morphological connections), and second, word-building as a teaching/learning strategy. 0346-251X/$ - see front matter Ó 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/j.system.2009.01.004 * Corresponding author. Tel.: +66 44224357. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J. Ward), [email protected] (J. Chuenjundaeng). Available online at www.sciencedirect.com System 37 (2009) 461–469 www.elsevier.com/locate/system

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Page 1: Suffix knowledge: Acquisition and applications

Available online at www.sciencedirect.com

System 37 (2009) 461–469

www.elsevier.com/locate/system

Suffix knowledge: Acquisition and applications

Jeremy Ward *, Jitlada Chuenjundaeng

Suranaree University of Technology, Amphoe Muang, Nakhon Ratchasima 30000, Thailand

Received 18 September 2008; received in revised form 26 January 2009; accepted 28 January 2009

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate L2 learners’ knowledge of complex word part analysis (‘‘word-building”),with particular reference to two issues: suffix acquisition and to the use of word families as a counting tool. Subjects weretwo groups of EAP students in a Thai university. Results suggest that (1) the use of word families as a counting tool leadsto highly misleading conclusions, especially with less proficient learners; (2) affix learning proceeds on the basis of stem toderived form and not vice versa; (3) the acquisition of stem + suffix occurs with certain particular suffixes before others; (4)such word-building schemas may depend on frequency of exposure. Implications for teaching are discussed.� 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Word morphology; Academic vocabulary; Suffix acquisition; Word families

1. Purposes of the study: word-building

In EFL vocabulary research, investigations of the L2 learner’s mental lexicon have commonly distinguishedbetween breadth and depth of vocabulary knowledge (how many words are known and how well) and mor-phological knowledge has usually figured as one aspect of depth of word knowledge (Nation, 2001; Read,2000; Richards, 1976). Issues investigated include the extent of learner’s affix knowledge and how it is relatedto overall vocabulary size (Mochizuki and Aizawa, 2000; Schmitt and Meara, 1997); how well learners are ableto mobilize word morphology knowledge for productive language use (Schmitt and Zimmerman, 2002);whether affix knowledge can show an acquisition order (Mochizuki and Aizawa, 2000); the construct of word

as in word family (Gardner, 2007); how to classify affixes for teaching purposes (Bauer and Nation, 1993); andhow word formation knowledge affects EFL students’ reading ability (e.g. Mirhassani and Toosi, 2000). Thepurpose of the present study is to investigate EFL learners’ knowledge of what we will call word-building. Byword-building we mean using morphological analysis of words for purposes of learning or understanding orremembering what they mean: what Nation (2001, p. 278) refers to as the ‘‘word part strategy for learningcomplex new words”. The work pertains to two main issues – first, word families (because they depend onmorphological connections), and second, word-building as a teaching/learning strategy.

0346-251X/$ - see front matter � 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.system.2009.01.004

* Corresponding author. Tel.: +66 44224357.E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J. Ward), [email protected] (J. Chuenjundaeng).

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462 J. Ward, J. Chuenjundaeng / System 37 (2009) 461–469

1.1. Word families

The word family is commonly taken to include most or all of the affixed forms of a headword. It is easy toassume that a learner who demonstrates knowledge of a headword such as use also knows uses, useful andother inflected or derived forms. This assumption is often made, explicitly or implicitly, in estimates of learn-ers’ vocabulary size, in estimates of how many words need to be known in order to read, and in estimates ofwhat lexical coverage is given by word lists (see e.g. Hyland and Tse, 2007; Nation, 1990; Read, 2000, p. 86).Nation claims that students need to know about 3000 (later amended downwards to about 2500) high-fre-quency word families to cope with reading university textbooks (2001, chapter 5). But in fact these word fam-ilies, from the General Service List (West, 1953) and the Academic Word List (Coxhead, 2000), when listedwith inflections and derivations, amount to almost 11,000 words (word types); any claims made, then, onthe basis of these word family lists assume a great deal of derivational knowledge. Some writers, however,appear to take for granted the skill of word-building, using word and word family almost interchangeably(e.g. Cobb and Horst, 2001; Nation and Waring, 1997; Nurweni and Read, 1999). If students do not word-build, then such vocabulary size estimates may be wildly underestimating the lexical knowledge necessary.

The idea of the word family relates to the local context of this study, a university in Thailand teaching Eng-lish for Academic Purposes (EAP). Nearly all Thai universities have EAP programmes (Tuptimtong, 1996)and the strategy of word-building is of particular interest to teachers of EAP. This is because so much of aca-demic vocabulary is Latinate in origin (Corson, 1997) and thus susceptible of morphological analysis. By aca-demic vocabulary I mean the type of words that occur over a wide range of academic disciplines but which areneither in the usual lists of ‘‘most frequent” words (e.g. the General Service List of West, 1953), nor technicalin nature. The Academic Word List mentioned above is a well-known list of such words and gives considerablelexical coverage of undergraduate textbooks (Coxhead and Nation, 2001), even in subjects such as engineeringwhich are not included in the corpus on which it is based (Ward, 1999). The list is of 570 word families butincludes a total of just over 3000 word types. In the academic context, if students were good at word-building,it seems on the face of it that they would be greatly helped in their reading. If on the other hand they are notgood at it, this would have implications for their ability to read their subject-specialist textbooks. Incidentally,the word families used in the study described below are taken from the AWL.

1.2. Word-building for teaching and learning

Second, word-building is of interest to the teacher of reading especially, because of the possibility of using itas a strategy for doing one of two things: for deducing the meaning of unknown words when reading, or forlearning and remembering words. Nation (2001, p. 280) claims it is useful for both high and low-frequencyvocabulary, though we may note here that elsewhere (p. 274) he adds the caveat ‘‘. . .it is probably mostefficient to begin to deal with word parts after learners have already learned a number of complex wordsas unanalyzed wholes”. It is difficult to properly assess the extent to which the subjects in this study – Thaiundergraduate students studying engineering and medicine – have been taught word-building. It is not preva-lent in the officially sanctioned textbooks for high school students; only two of seven prescribed books (ineighteen surveyed high schools) even mention word-building.

Conversations with teachers, however, reveal that the vast majority bring into class supplementary materialsfrom other commercial textbooks, especially for promoting the vocabulary knowledge and reading skills whichare so important in the university entrance examination. In a leading Bangkok bookstore we found seventeenEnglish textbooks, aimed specifically at students preparing for the university entrance examination, with sec-tions on word-building. The percentage of pages devoted to word-building in these books was just under 50in two cases, and between 10 and 20 in six other cases. The complete information can be seen in AppendixB. This, admittedly, is tenuous evidence, but it is strengthened by the results of a brief questionnaire given(in Thai) to 150 incoming students (at the authors’ institution) in three classes for academic year 2008. Thesestudents were not the subjects in the actual study, although they were from the same educational background.About 84% said they had learnt about English suffixes in high school (50% in junior high and 34% in senior).This however did not translate into any perceived mastery of the topic. The 78% said they were ‘‘not really sure”

that they understood about English suffixes and only 18% said that the teacher placed considerable emphasis on

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J. Ward, J. Chuenjundaeng / System 37 (2009) 461–469 463

the subject (57% claimed ‘‘moderate” emphasis). The questions and the answers here are admittedly too vagueto draw any firm conclusions from. But we can claim that many of our subjects have some mental representa-tion of word-building – they have heard of it and have some (however vague) idea of what it is.

2. Methodology

2.1. Rationale

Word knowledge is tested here by a simple L2–L1 translation test. If a subject shows this knowledge wemay refer to them as having acquired the word; we use the term loosely.

The methodology in this study is based on the idea that it may be easier to establish when word-building isnot taking place than when it is. If a student claims to know the word equipment, for example, it is difficult toknow whether this is because he knows equip and -ment and is using these two pieces of information together,or because he happens to have learnt equipment as an unanalyzed whole. We reject using self-reports to resolvethis for three reasons: such reports may rely on recollection of learning events that occurred some time pre-viously; subjects may realise what the researcher wants to hear and respond accordingly; and it is in any casevery difficult to avoid asking leading questions. As far as this study is concerned a learner who knows bothequip and equipment may or may not be word-building. On the other hand a learner who knows neither equipnor equipment is obviously in no position to demonstrate word-building ability. The more revealing cases arewhere learners say they know equip but not equipment, or vice versa. In these two cases we can point to a def-inite absence of word-building ability in a situation where it would in theory be helpful (Table 1).

2.2. Subjects

Two separate groups took the tests. For brevity’s sake we will refer to these groups as G1 and G2. G1 con-sisted of first and second year undergraduates from the faculty of engineering. The second group, G2, wasfrom the faculty of medicine. All subjects in theory need to read English language textbooks during theircourses of study, though it is dubious to what extent the student body as a whole succeeds in doing this.

It is an assumption of this study that G2 are considerably more proficient in English than G1. About 75 ofthe questionnaire subjects (see Section 1.2) consented to give their English scores on the national universityentrance examination: the 41 engineering students reported scores averaging 31%, while 34 medical studentsreported an average of 47%. In addition the medical programme at the authors’ institution is much more selec-tive than the engineering programme: the former’s annual intake is 40–50, as opposed to about 1000 with thelatter. In addition the requirements for medical students to take English seriously are much more stringentthan for engineering students. Anecdotally speaking, no teachers here would dispute the assumption thatG2 are considerably stronger in English than G1.

2.3. Tests

Subjects were given two vocabulary tests, one week apart. They were not informed of the second one whenthey took the first. The first test asked subjects to translate 32 words, 16 basewords and 16 derived formsrepresenting 32 different families. The second test asked them to translate the 16 basewords of the derived

Table 1Four different response types.

Test result Called(in this study)

Interpretation

Learner knows equip and equipment Condition 1 Learner may or may not have learnt or remembered these wordsthrough some process of word-building

Learner knows equip but not equipment Condition 2 Learner does not understand the significance of –ment as a separatemorpheme and is therefore not word-buildingLearner knows equipment but not equip Condition 3

Learner knows neither equip nor equipment Condition 4 Learner does not have the necessary information for word-building

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464 J. Ward, J. Chuenjundaeng / System 37 (2009) 461–469

forms from test 1, and 16 derived forms from the basewords in test 1. Thus if in the first test the subject wasasked to translate intense, in the second week he would be asked about intensity, and vice versa; if in the firstweek assignment, in the second assign. The two test forms may be seen in Appendix A.

2.4. Choice of words

For the test we chose word families from the AWL, as this list matches the EAP-oriented nature of the stu-dents’ English programme and also provides substantial coverage of the type of academic text they are requiredto read (see above). Note that more than 82% of the words in the AWL ‘‘are of Greek and Latin origin”

(Coxhead, 2000, p. 228–229), making the list a prime source for words requiring morphological analysis.

2.5. Choice of affixes to be tested

Bauer and Nation (1993) graded affixes for purposes of teaching and learning into seven levels, based onvarious criteria which we may roughly summarize as ease of learning and frequency of occurrence. At level1 all word types are treated as separate. At level 2 we find inflectional affixes like -ing and -s, which are verycommon (Nation, 2001, p. 265) and (being strictly rule-based) presumed learnable (but see Schmitt & Meara,op.cit. for some justifiable reservations on this point). At level 3 of difficulty, with the introduction of deriva-tional affixes, we find (among others) the affixes -able, -less, -er and -ness; then at level 4 -tion, -ity, -al, -ful and-ment. From these supposedly easier and demonstrably frequent suffixes we chose -tion, -er, -ity and -ment forinvestigation; if our learners are word-building, it is relatively likely that these suffixes will be in their reper-toire. We show below the occurrence of three of these suffixes in the GSL and AWL. Note that these derivedforms make up almost 10% of the word types in the AWL. Note also that the -er suffix here is the one denotingagent or instrument, not the comparative suffix, which is placed at level 2 in Bauer and Nation (Table 2).

2.6. Procedure

With both groups, the Thai co-author researcher distributed the test before explaining and showing anexample of how to answer the test. In the example, the suffixes used were -ness, and -able, which are differentfrom those in the test. Instructions were given in Thai.

2.7. Scoring

For correct translations of the sixty-four words, the researcher followed the translations from two well-known English-Thai dictionaries. Subject responses were marked as 1 for correct translations and 0 for incor-rect and non-responses. Students were given 0 where their answers showed lack of awareness of the deriva-tional affix (e.g. where they translated similarity as similar or vice versa).

3. Results

3.1. Engineering students (G1)

Table 3 below shows the results from G1, the students in, or soon to be in, the faculty of engineering; therewere 167 subjects, consisting of one group in the first year of study and another in the second and third years.

Table 2Number of occurrences of three noun suffixes in GSL and AWL.

Suffixes GSL1 GSL2 AWL

-ment 21 19 33-tion 59 43 195-ity 33 17 66Total words in list 4100 3600 3112

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Table 3G1 levels of baseword/derived form knowledge.

Affix Condition 1 (%) Condition 2 (%) Condition 3 (%) Condition 4 (%)

-tion 9.5 13.4 6.7 70.4-er 8.5 17.2 6.9 67.4-ment 3.4 4.7 7.3 84.6-ity 5.7 4.0 5.8 84.4

Table 4G2 levels of baseword/derived form knowledge (%).

Affix Condition 1 (%) Condition 2 (%) Condition 3 (%) Condition 4 (%)

-tion 29.2 13.2 16.7 41.0-er 35.5 16.1 13.6 34.7-ment 14.3 11.8 17.1 56.8-ity 15.2 20.6 11.9 52.2

J. Ward, J. Chuenjundaeng / System 37 (2009) 461–469 465

Recall that each subject translated 8 word pairs (e.g. equip/equipment) for each suffix; there were thus 1336(8 � 167) responses for each suffix type. The table shows the percentage of responses at each condition – con-dition 1 showing knowledge of both forms and thus the possibility that word-building is taking place; conditions2 and 3 showing knowledge of either one or other but not both of the forms, indicating an absence of word-building; and condition 4 showing knowledge of neither form, and thus the impossibility of word-building.

The condition 1 figures above show that word-building might be happening in less than 10% of cases (lessthan 5% in the case of the -ment words). The high figures in the condition 4 column show that with 70–85% ofword pairs word-building could not in any case occur, because students lack the basic vocabulary knowledgenecessary; but conditions 2 and 3 show that even where they have this basic vocabulary knowledge (of eitherbase or derived form) they generally fail to put it to word-building purposes. The conditions 2 and 3 responsescombined occur between two and three times as often as the condition 1 response. There is very little evidenceof word-building here.

3.2. Medical students (G2)

G2 consisted of 90 subjects, 44 of them first year students and 46 second. Table 4 shows the results, pre-sented in the same way as in Table 3.

From looking just at condition 4, showing cases where subjects knew neither base nor derived form, G2appear to have much greater vocabulary knowledge than G1. But there is an interesting rider to this conclu-sion, discussion of which follows in Section 4.2.

4. Discussion

We discuss these results in two parts following the two issues raised in Section 1 – word families (Section4.1) and word-building for teaching and learning (Section 4.2).

4.1. Word families

Our results contradict the assumption that knowledge of headwords implies knowledge of word families, atleast with lower-level students from non-Latinate L1 backgrounds.

Table 5 below compares the number of condition 1 responses with the combined total of conditions 2 and 3responses, for each of the two groups of subjects. Remember that condition 1 shows that subjects might beword-building, conditions 2 and 3 that they are not.

In the majority of cases subjects demonstrate word-building skills far less often than the opposite. Giventhis, it is simply inaccurate to imply, as (for example) Cobb and Horst (2001, p. 319) do, that learning the2000 ‘‘words” of the GSL and the 570 of the AWL brings the learners to the threshold level where they know

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Table 5Condition 1 responses vs. condition 2/3 responses for two groups.

Affix G1 (% responses) condition 1–condition 2 + 3 G2 (% responses) condition 1–condition 2 + 3

-tion 9.5–20.1 29.2–29.9-er 8.5–24.1 35.5–29.7-ment 3.4–12.0 14.3–28.9-ity 5.7–9.8 15.2–32.5

466 J. Ward, J. Chuenjundaeng / System 37 (2009) 461–469

95% of the running words in academic texts. Note that these researchers are dealing with students whose initialperformance on Nation’s (1990) Levels Test showed a receptive knowledge of only 900 of the 2000 headwordsin the GSL; but since this shows that their overall vocabulary knowledge is rather poor, it is likely that theirknowledge of the 900 families is also inadequate, so they are even further away from the target. SimilarlyNurweni & Read’s (op.cit.) study deals with Indonesian university students who appear to know on averageabout 1000 ‘‘words” (headwords) from the 2000-word-family GSL and about 240 headwords from the 800-word-family UWL (the predecessor of the AWL); but it is claimed that the 2800 ‘‘words” will give 92% cov-erage of academic texts. If these ‘‘words” are headwords, then this is simply not the case.

Are we exaggerating the importance of knowing derived forms? We listed all the derived forms in the GSLand AWL with endings -er, -tion, -ment and -ity. Naturally we excluded any that were listed as family head-words (condition, moment etc.), since these are counted under the 2570 ‘‘words” contributing to the 95% textcoverage; we also excluded allomorphic suffixes such as -sion (for -tion) and -or (for -er). We were obliged toinclude various words like equation, which are listed in the AWL as derivatives although one might intuitivelyprefer to call them headwords. When we ran this list against a 250,000-word corpus from undergraduate engi-neering textbooks (prime EAP material) it gave no less than 3% token coverage. Note that we are not suggestinghere that anybody goes through some process of morphological analysis in order to learn or understand wordsas frequent as equation – we are only talking about how words are counted. By removing the derived formsinvolving only the four mentioned suffixes out of many, the coverage of the GSL and AWL shrinks by 3%.

At the same time, it may be objected that inflected forms present considerably less difficulty than the kindsof derivation we have tested here. In this view, the unit of counting could be the lemma rather than the wordfamily: as Gardner (2007) claims, if we counted only unique spellings (word types?) we would forfeit ‘‘psycho-logical validity” because few would in fact fail to associate boy with boys or walk with walks. There is a body ofwork suggesting that the most frequent and regular affixes (i.e. those normally included in the lemma) areacquired fairly early (see for example a number of the studies in Daller et al., 2007). We would certainly admitthat, overall, inflections are more readily mastered than derivations. It may also be true that among inflec-tional affixes, as per Gardner’s examples above, the -s affix (nominal or verbal) presents little difficulty in itself.But we would point out three things in response to this. First, while we acknowledge the general point, it islikely that inflectional affixes are easier for learners with L1s which themselves inflect (unlike the Thai learnersin the present study). Second, understanding the inflected -ed and -ing forms, and distinguishing their varioususes, often requires a considerable knowledge of English grammar, which our lower-level learners are unlikelyto possess. Finally, the point made above about the considerable frequency of derivations is unaffected.

These results tend to support Corson’s (1997) idea of the lexical bar in EAP. These high condition 4 resultssuggest that our subjects have sketchy knowledge of what is called academic vocabulary and that this is partlybecause of the difficulties posed by derived forms (or perhaps by the absence of L1 assistance in acquiring anacademic vocabulary). Even with their higher scores, G2 tend to miss chances to word-build more often thanthey take them, even with these common suffixes. Results suggest that the lexical bar may not be overcome bylearning 570 words, but perhaps closer to 3000.

4.2. Word-building for teaching and learning

4.2.1. Teaching

It appears that whatever efforts are made to teach word-building in Thai schools, they do not meet withmuch success. Whether this is mainly because of shortcomings in the system (textbooks, teachers) or because

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Table 6G2 and G1 scores juxtaposed.

Affix Condition 1 (%) G1–G2 Condition 2 (%) G1–G2 Condition 3 (%) G1–G2 Condition 4 (%) G1–G2

-tion 9.5–29.2 13.4–13.2 6.7–16.7 70.4–41.0

-er 8.5–35.5 17.2–16.1 6.9–13.6 67.4–34.7

-ment 3.4–14.3 4.7–11.8 7.3–17.3 84.6–56.8

-ity 5.6–15.2 4.0–20.6 5.8–11.9 84.4–52.2

J. Ward, J. Chuenjundaeng / System 37 (2009) 461–469 467

of the inherent difficulty of the topic is of course a moot point. The following discussion may suggest that weunderestimate the latter at our peril.

For convenience’s sake G1 and G2’s results are presented together in Table 6.Simply put, the condition 4 columns in Table 6 show that the G2 subjects know a lot more words than G1.

What part, if any, has word-building played in this?What are the constituents of the greater vocabulary knowledge that G2 appear to have acquired? They have

acquired more derived forms: this is clearly shown by the condition 3 columns in Table 6 above. Theseacquired words must also be a factor in their much better condition 1 results. In short, better knowledge ofderived forms feeds into higher conditions 1 and 3 scores.

But this does not happen with two sets of basewords, those taking -er and -tion suffixes. Note that the num-ber of condition 2 responses with these words is the same for G1 as it is for G2. Better knowledge of basewordsmust be one factor in the higher condition 1 scores, but it has no effect on condition 2 scores.

One explanation for this might be that the ‘‘extra” basewords (taking -er and -tion) – the basewords G2have acquired that G1 have not – have all fed into the condition 1 results column, and would suggest that theytend to have been acquired together with their derived forms. This in turn suggests that at a certain stage ofacquisition, learners may tend to acquire certain derived forms from basewords, but not vice versa; they donot learn basewords from derived forms to nearly the same extent. In other words dividing up derived formsmay be less likely to lead to acquisition than ‘‘building up” basewords.

The literature (Mochizuki and Aizawa, 2000; Schmitt and Meara, 1997) claims that overall vocabulary sizeand knowledge of derivational affixes are related. While we do not know the cause/effect relations betweenthem, this might suggest that derivational knowledge should not be a primary concern of teachers oflower-level learners.

This in turn has various implications for teachers. It suggests the time spent on teaching or promoting mor-phological analysis might be better employed with activities promoting acquisition of derived forms as unan-alyzed wholes – for example more intensive and extensive reading; better teaching of dictionary use for quickeraccess to derived forms; or more research on which particular derived forms are especially useful in particularlearning contexts (to give an obvious example, frequency data tells us that equation is essential for engineerswhile equality is less so). These results however might also support the idea of introducing some derived formsbut only as adjuncts to particular headwords.

4.2.2. Learning

In terms of acquisition (learning), the question arises why the -er/-tion effect shown above does not applywith the suffixes -ity and -ment.

The evidence from this study is insufficient for any firm conclusions, but a tentative explanation may beoffered. Following Bybee (Bybee, 1995, 2006), we will assume for the sake of this argument, first, that inputfrequency is a significant factor in L2 as in L1 acquisition and second, that learners form schemas or mentalrepresentations about the morphological features that they notice. Although we can only really guess aboutinput frequency in our subjects’ experience, since a large native speaker corpus like the BNC or the Browncorpus could hardly be claimed to represent anything like our subjects’ experience of English, it is likely thatsubjects have had substantial exposure to words like teacher (which student has not?), farmer (over 50% of theThai population could be loosely described as being engaged in agriculture), and driver (which is almost a loanword in Thai). These and others, we guess, have served as the basis of some mental representation, as exem-plars, as some emergent schema, of this suffix in English. It probably helps that these -er words are so concrete.

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468 J. Ward, J. Chuenjundaeng / System 37 (2009) 461–469

That does not apply to -tion, the other seemingly known suffix, but we guess that the input frequency of wordslike conversation (the holy grail of so many learners), introduction (a common theme in beginners’ EFLcourses), information, and action (movies) might have had the same effect. This argument risks becoming ten-dentious, but it might be an interesting subject of some future research.

5. Conclusion

The idea of dividing up words to facilitate comprehension or learning is based on a sophisticated analysisderived from knowledge of classical or Latinate languages. It may appear to represent a plausible short-cut tovocabulary acquisition. But the results shown here suggest otherwise. This is perhaps because for the uniniti-ated morphological analysis involves applying a whole system of unfamiliar rules. This has implications bothfor the use of word families and for the teaching and learning of complex words.

Appendix A. Tested words

Test 1

Test 2

Headwords

Derived words Headwords Derived words

Design

Challenger Challenge Designer

Lecture

Exporter Export Lecturer

Publish

Occupier Occupy Publisher

Consume

Researcher Research Consumer

Equip

Assignment Assign Equipment

Require

Achievement Achieve Requirement

Invest

Assessment Assess Investment Establish Adjustment Adjust Establishment

Violate

Prediction Predict Violation

Estimate

Creation Create Estimation

Select

Construction Construct Selection

Define

Indication Indicate Definition

Secure

Complexity Complex Security

Similar

Intensity Intense Similarity

Capable

Diversity Diverse Capability Flexible Validity Valid Flexibility

Appendix B. Word-building in high school textbooks

Italicised words are translated from Thai.

Book title

Totalpages

Word-buildingpages

%

Preparation Handbook for the G12 English examination

253 27 11 Entrance express 60 26 43 O-net, A-net 2007 English examination preparation for G10–12 688 24 3 Perfect vocabulary for entrance 268 58 22 New top 100 English (all skills) 228 9 4 Preparation Handbook for G10–12 English examinations 612 14 2 Preparing for the A-net English examination 203 10 5 G12 English Handbook – guide to increasing your score 612 14 2
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J. Ward, J. Chuenjundaeng / System 37 (2009) 461–469 469

Appendix B continued

Book title

Totalpages

Word-buildingpages

%

Preparation Handbook for the G11 English examination (Grammar/Vocabulary)

294

23 8

Foundations of English word analysis

301 49 16 Vocabulary for admission 160 25 16 English vocabulary for intermediate learners 249 43 17 Modern English for examination (sic) 846 55 7 G10–12 vocabulary attack techniques for entrance 274 133 49 O-Net, A-Net English examination Handbook 432 18 4 English entrance 03: preparation for scoring marks 316 6 2 Vocabulary for admission tests for O-Net, A-Net 229 23 10

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