Abstract:
Morphological Awareness (henceforth: MA), defined as the ability to understand the morphemic structure of the words, has been reported to affect various aspects of second language performance including reading comprehension ability, spelling performance, etc. Yet, the concept has been far less treated with reference to l2 listening transcription. Thus, against this background, this study aims to investigate the link between MA and listening transcription ability of Iranian pre-university students. To this aim, 40 pre-university students participated in the study, and were assigned to two control and experimental groups. Both groups were first given three short listening passages to transcribe as the pre-tests. The results of the independent-samples t-test revealed no significant difference between the two groups. The experimental group, then, received five one-hour sessions briefing them on the morphological realization of English words. The two groups were then given three short listening passages to transcribe as their post-tests. The results of the independent-samples t-tests attested to the significant difference between the two groups, thus, supporting the relationship between MA and listening transcription ability. The study concludes with some suggestions as to the incorporation of MA into L2 learning programs.
Machine summary:
"The Impact of Morphological Awareness on Iranian Pre-University Students’ Listening Transcription Mohammad Nabi Karimi (Allvar) 1 Tarbiat Moallem University, Tehran, Iran Amer Gheitury Razi University of Kermanshah, Tehran, Iran Morphological Awareness (henceforth: MA), defined as the ability to understand the morphemic structure of the words, has been reported to affect various aspects of second language performance including reading comprehension ability, spelling performance, etc.
(The word digging which contained the morpheme –ing was a target word) b) The girl’s dolls are inside the room ( The word girl’s is a target word here; it is believed to be a complex case as the participants should distinguish between girl’s and girls which is achieved through morphological rather than phonological awareness) Results As discussed earlier, the study aimed to specifically deal with the following question: Does EFL students’ morphological awareness have any significant effect upon their listening transcription ability?
Discussion The significant effect of morphological awareness on the participants’ listening transcription is mainly owing to the fact that there are many words in English (as in most other written languages) whose spellings cannot be predicted from mere awareness of phonology, but are entirely regular if analyzed into morphemes.
Moreover, knowledge of morphological characteristics of a word is believed to be related to building a substantial vocabulary size, identification of their grammatical categories, and effective word recognition skills which are, in turn, reported to be strong predictors of listening transcription performance (Nation & Newton, 2009)."