Effectiveness of Morphological Awareness in English Writing Composition of Pakistani Students at the Undergraduate Level-Case Study

Abstract

Word formation is a key part of morphological awareness (MA) which is essential for vocabulary increase but neglected by the teachers and course planners (Tahaineh, 2012). In Pakistan, students of English language are not explicitly given morphological awareness and most of the courses are taught in English for general purposes. The study explores the development of students' knowledge to use prefixes and suffixes meaningfully, in a paragraph writing. For this, they were given morphological awareness on the word formation to construct, identify and to self-correct the words. Data was collected quantitatively through pre-test and post-test. Students were given treatment to check the effectiveness of MA before the post-test. Participants of the study were 30 students of BS English Language and Literature, 3^rd semester’s students of a private university of Pakistan. The study found that morphological awareness is effective and improves students’ writings. It further indicates that there is a need to include word formation as key component of English writing composition as undergraduate level.

Keywords: Morphological Awareness (MA), prefixes, suffixes, word formation