The effect of explicit instruction on derivational morphological awareness amongst Iranian EFL learners

The explicit instruction on derivational morphology has attracted little attention as an object of effective EFL teaching method. The current study attempted to investigate the impact of morphological instruction on relational, syntactic and distributional aspects of derivational morphology amongst intermediate EFL learners. The participants were 129 lower/higher intermediate students, randomly assigned into experimental and control groups. The study had a pre-test-post-test quasi-experimental control group design. The results demonstrated that before the instruction there was a significant difference in each of the three aspects of derivational morphology and distributional aspect was the lowest score amongst the three aspects. The experimental groups outperformed the control groups on all three tasks assessing derivational morphology. For lower intermediate experimental group, syntactic aspect was more susceptible to instruction and for the higher intermediate experimental group it was the distributional aspect. The results also demonstrated that morphological instruction can benefit lower level of proficiency to a higher degree. The findings of the present study imply the merits of explicit morphological instruction on derivational morphology by isolating each aspect and observing the sequence of their presentation to EFL learners.