The effects of explicit morphological instruction on vocabulary acquisition and morphological awareness

This paper examines the effects of explicit morphology instruction on English vocabulary acquisition and morphological awareness in a Swedish L2 secondary school context. The purpose of this paper was to research if explicit morphology instruction affects students’ vocabulary acquisition and morphological awareness. The research questions for this paper are: To what extent does explicit morphology instruction affect morphological awareness in a Swedish 7-9 school context? and to what extent does explicit morphology instruction affect vocabulary learning in a Swedish 7-9 school context? A quantitative method with pre- and posttests was used to measure the effects of the intervention at a school with three participating classes and one teacher that taught the intervention. The study was conducted during a four-week period with short sessions of the intervention taught in the experimental groups each lesson and the control-group were taught their ordinary materials. The results of our study were statistically insignificant because of issues regarding the number of participating students. Instead, we focused on highlighting specific examples from the experimental groups in both morphological awareness and vocabulary acquisition