The Importance Of Morphological Awareness In Language Learning

Morphological awareness as a multidimensional competence is defined as the ability to reflect upon morphemes and the morphological structure of words (Carlisle, 2003; Kuo and Anderson, 2006), and manipulate those smaller meaningful parts such as affixes, and roots that builds words (Carlisle & Nomanbhoy, 1993; Jarmulowicz, Taran, & Hay, 2007; Kuo & Anderson, 2006; Nagy, Berninger, & Abbott, 2006) . For children who are learning their native language, morphological awareness develops so quickly with the help of their exposure to spoken language, requiring limited exposure to printed words; However, the case is not the same when second language learning is considered. For EFL learners who have not been exposed to spoken form of the

In learning the second language, morphological awareness plays an important role. One of the most outstanding contributions of morphological awareness to language learning is in reading, where more than any other language element, vocabulary knowledge is needed. About 60 percent of the unfamiliar words which a reader encounters while reading a text, have meaning which can be predicted based on their component parts (Nagy and Anderson, 1984); so a reader with more information about word formation processes would be better able to infer, guess, and finally comprehend the meanings of unfamiliar words(Nagy, Berninger, Abbott, and Vaughan,

It brings component parts together in order to make words. The learners, as it is shown by many studies, know the order of pieces and are able to construct words (Arnoff & Fudeman, 2005, Mc-Bride-Chang et al., 2005). Morphological awareness whether used analytically or synthetically has been reported by many studies to account for significant variance in different skills such as reading, writing, vocabulary acquisition and spelling development(e.g., Carlisle, 2000; Champion, 1997; Tyler & Nagy, 1990; Freyd & Baron, 1982; Mahony, 1994; Deacon, Wade-Woolley & Kirby, 2007; Mann, 1986; Leong, 2000; Deacon & Kirby, 2004; Deacon & Bryant, 2006). Among all these researches done, it seems that it is vocabulary learning and reading comprehension which has attracted too much attention to