Acquisition of Morphological Competence in Spelling as a Developmental Process

Acquisition of Morphological Competence in Spelling as a Developmental Process

Abstract

It is commonly believed that learning to spell English words demands an understanding of the relationship between sounds and letters and a memory for those words or parts of words that lack consistency in their spellings. The English orthography is richly morphophonemic yet the role morphology plays in learning to spell is not well understood. Besides, there have been very few investigations in this area. In order that learners may be able to spell, with ease, polymorphemic words used in writing, detailed knowledge of morphemic structure of words should be acquired. Some theories which are relevant to this study were also reviewed. They include the dual mechanism theory. This study seeks to investigate the developmental nature of acquisition of morphological competence which is a gradual process from childhood to adulthood. In doing this, different forms of tests on knowledge of inflectional and derivational morphemes, morpheme segmentation and identification parts of speech of words and knowledge of word families were administered to participants made up of pupils from two primary schools: one from an urban area and the other from a rural area and students from three secondary schools: one from an urban area and two which are a single sex school and a mixed school from rural areas. Pupils and students were used to enable the researcher observe the developmental trend of acquisition of morphological competence in spelling which according to theorists lasts beyond puberty. It was found out that inflectional morphemes were acquired at a faster pace than derivational morphemes for some reasons. Again, language users employed their knowledge of morphology more in speech than in writing. It was also found out that environment plays a role in the acquisition of the inflectional and derivational morphemes. It was concluded that detailed knowledge of how morphology works helps second language users attain proficiency in spelling and improve their writing.

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