University of Southeastern Philippines
University of Southeastern Philippines
University of Southeastern Philippines
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A TERM PAPER
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In Partial Fulfillment
of the Course Requirement for the Subject
INTRODUCTION TO LINGUISTICS
Presented to:
Presented by:
MED-LT 1
DECEMBER 2017
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Chapter I
INTRODUCTION
This chapter presents the background of the study, the statement of the problem, the
significance of the study, the scope and limitation, and the definition of terms used in the
study.
growth, but this skill has scarcely been measured in adults. In the process of growing up in
a literate society, most young people gain a large vocabulary, and word learning can
continue throughout the lifespan. It is hard to appreciate the scale of this achievement
because no one knows precisely how many words are learned. There is an enormous
research literature describing the early years of language development, and many
mechanisms of word learning have been identified in young children. There is also a large
research base about learning to read and the related gains in language ability during early
years of schooling. Most of the research has focused on how communication ability
develops in childhood, and less is known about vocabulary development in adolescents and
adults. There is still no complete explanation for the vast word-learning accomplishment
Two highly influential studies have examined the conditions of English vocabulary
learning, and these papers prompted the current study. In the first study, Nagy and
Anderson (1984) analyzed the words found in typical school materials through grade 9,
and determined that the teaching of vocabulary would fall short because there are too many
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words to be taught. They concluded that children must be gaining much of their vocabulary
through reading, and by making inferences about words that are semantically transparent.
Anglin (1993) interviewed school children to learn about the depth and breadth of their
word knowledge. The children were encouraged to try to explain words that they were
unable to define. For example, one child who didn’t know the word treelet, decided by
analogy that it must mean a small tree because a piglet was a little pig. Anglin called this
multimorphemic words was low in first graders, but increased dramatically by fifth grade.
He suggested that the ability to analyze the morphemes in complex words accounted for a
There have been many estimates of vocabulary size for different ages, and the totals
vary tremendously. At 12 months of age, when most children are beginning to produce
single words, some children have a vocabulary of 52 words and others have zero (Bates et
al., 1994). A typical first-grader may know 2,700 words (Dolch, 1936) or 26,000 (Shibles,
1959). With older students, the estimates diverge even more. An average college student
may have a vocabulary of 17,000 words (Goulden, Nation, & Read, 1990; D'Anna,
Zechmeister, & Hall, 1991), or 200,000 words (Hartman, 1946 cited in Anderson &
Freebody, 1981).
One method of conceptualizing word knowledge used a scale with 4 levels (Dale,
1965). A person might (1) never have seen the word before; (2) know that it is a word, but
not know the 16 meaning; (3) know the general idea of a word; or (4) know a word well.
Measuring knowledge of root or basic words is one way to avoid the word definition
problem. Root words or basic words are not inflected or derived, and must be learned
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individually. For example, a child would have to learn the meaning of think, but would be
assumed to know the inflected forms: thinks, thinking, and even the irregular past tense,
thought. By one account, children older than second-graders can gain about 1,000 basic
words per year (Biemiller & Boote, 2006). Using basic words to estimate vocabulary size
is a sensible accommodation to the problem of defining separate words, but such a count
does not fully indicate the depth or quality of a person’s word knowledge. To make better
use of the basic word measure, an additional measure would be valuable: the extent to
which the word learner can use morphological clues to interpret complex words formed
from basic words. Such a measure would indicate recognition of word families, as in
groupthink. This is the ability that would be rated with a test of morphological awareness
(MA).
Due to the methodological problems, we do not know precisely how large an adult’s
vocabulary is, but we know that the numbers are large. Accounting for the rapid increase
in word knowledge that begins in childhood and continues throughout adulthood is even
1. What is the morphological awareness of the GAS and ABM Senior High School of
Theory Base
This study will use the vocabulary development theories which are the following: First,
the mutual exclusivity principle (Markan, 1990), or the novel- nameless category principle
(Golinkoff, Shuff- Bailey, & Olguin, 1995). For instance, children often assume that a new
word applies to something for which they did not already have a name. A variation is the
principle of contrast that states that no two words mean exactly the same thing (Clark,
1993).
Second, the whole object bias is another principle that would simplify word-to-
referent mapping, and a taxonomic bias would guide the extension of the word to similar
objects (Markman, 1990). Using these guidelines, a child would assume that the word cat
refers to the entire animal, and not just to its fur, its tail, or some other feature, and that cat
also applies to other creatures that look like a cat. Some constraints theorists have
maintained that these are innate properties, but others have proposed developmental
pathways for constraints. For example, one set of multiple constraints has been proposed,
beginning with three basic principles that get word learning off the ground, and evolve into
Third, the shape bias is another principle that enables children to apply a newly
learned noun to other objects with similar forms, but Smith (1999) describes this as an
emergent, not innate, mechanism. Markson and Bloom (1997) showed that 3- and 4-year-
olds learned novel facts as readily as novel words, concluding that a dedicated word
learning system is unneeded. Similarly, Samuelson and Smith (1998) explained examples
of word learning through memory and attention, asserting that specialized skills for words
are unjustified.
information within an utterance can help a child determine the meaning of an unfamiliar
word. Two-year-olds can use their understanding of familiar verbs (such as eat, ride, or
spill) and their general knowledge to infer the meanings of unfamiliar nouns (Goodman,
McDonough, & Brown, 1998). Children listened to sentences such as "Mommy feeds the
ferret," and were asked to pick out the target noun ferret from a page with drawings of 3
inanimate objects and 1 small mammal. The 24- and 30-month old participants correctly
identified a novel noun an average of 4.3 times out of 10. Thus, by the age of 2 or 3, children
can draw on an array of cues to figure out the meanings of new words (Maag, 2007).
Young children have many strategies for figuring out new words and use multiple
methods for doing so (Hirsh-Pasek, Golinkoff, & Hollich, 2000; Akhtar, 2002, Bloom,
2000). It is probably safe to assume that older children can use the same methods and apply
learning vocabulary increases with age (Carlisle, 2000; Carlisle & Fleming, 2003; Nagy et
al., 2006; Nagy et al., 2003). For example, Nagy et al. (2003) found the relationship
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grade than in second grade. Anglin (1993) reported that students’ morphological awareness
skills got better in later grades. This may partly explain the incremental importance of
morphological awareness in learning new words throughout the school years. As the
students sharpen their ability to analyze words using morphological clues, they become
understanding the morphological structure of complex words enables children to infer the
and the constituent morphemes of these words are familiar enough to make a reasonable
The Schema Theory or the Schema Perspective theory states that all knowledge is
organized into units. Within these units of knowledge, or schemata, is stored information.
The goal of this theory is to describe interaction between what is in the text and how that
Schemata, according to Rumelhart and Ortony, represent generic concepts are stored
in memory. The way in which a particular concept is stored is not by remembering the
isolated event in its totality down to its most basic components. The goal of schema theory
is to describe interaction between what is in the text and how that information is shaped
and store and stored by the reader. (Adams and Collins) The underlying assumption is
that meaning does not lie solely in the print itself, but interacts with the cognitive structure
or schemata already present in the reader’s mind. In fact, readers appear to activate a
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schema as soon they begin to read. The initial schema then activates others, thus directly
affecting how readers understand and react to a text. Schemas that are related to text
Conceptual Framework
The conceptual framework in Figure 1 shows the different variables of the study.
category principle, whole object bias, and shape bias as the independent variable. The
morphological awareness consisting of the word knowledge and familiarity of the word.
The senior high strand, sex and age are identified as the moderator variable.
Moderator Variable
- Senior High Strand (Tech.
Voc)
- Sex
- Age Figure 1.
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Students. This study would give the students adequate awareness on their
Teachers. This study would provide the teachers an idea of their learners’ vocabulary
size and development which will guide them as to the level of difficulty of assessments and
Future Researchers. This study would provide useful resources for future researchers
development.
The study aims to measure morphological awareness by utilizing the principle of the
mutual exclusivity principle or the novel name-nameless category principle, whole object
bias, shape bias, and other language knowledge. This will be used to determine the
Definition of Terms
The following terms are operationally defined to clarify the terms used in this study.
Technical Vocational refers to one of the four strands of the Senior High School.
structure of words and their ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure” (Carlisle,
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1995, p. 194). Morphemes are the smallest units of meaning in a word. Words can be either
(inflectional or derivational) (Gombert, Cole, Valdois, Goigoux, Mousty & Fayol, 2000).
word stem required by the syntax (for example, I tum-> she turns; one book-> two books)”
(Kuo & Anderson, 2006, p. 163). Derivational morphology involves “the addition of a
morpheme to change the part of speech or the meaning of a base morpheme (for example,
Related Literature
Vocabulary
National Reading Panel (National Institute of Child Health and Human Development
[NICHHD] 2000) has identified it as one of the five critical components of reading
knowledge, word recognition, and meaning, word study, fluency, and responding).
One of the key indicators of students’ success in school, on standardized tests, and
indeed, in life, is their vocabulary. The reason of this is simply that the knowledge
anyone has about a topic is based on the vocabulary of that information (Marzano &
Pickering, 2005). “teaching vocabulary will not guarantee success in reading, just as
learning to read words will not guarantee success in reading. However, lacking either
adequate word identification skills or adequate vocabulary will ensure failure” (Biemiller,
2005).
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In grades 3 through 12, an average student is likely to learn approximately 3,000 new
vocabulary words each year, if he or she reads between 500,000 and a million words of
More specifically, we use vocabulary to refer to the kind of words that students must
know to read increasingly demanding text with comprehension (kamil & Heibert, 2005).
Morphology
Morphology is widely held to be part of the explanation for how children learn so
may words that they were never explicitly taught (e.g. Anglin, 1993; Carlisle & Fleming,
2003; Carlisle, 2007; Nagy and Anderson, 1984; Taft & Kougious, 2004). Anglin (1993)
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Students who understand how words are formed by combining prefixes, suffixes,
and roots tend to have larger vocabularies and better reading comprehension than peers
without such knowledge and skills (Prince 2009). Nagy (2007) proposed that the teaching
morphological awareness in school may be the way to narrow the achievement gap for
children whose families differ in education and income levels, and ethnic or racial
backgrounds. A deep and full knowledge and understanding of vocabulary will improve
word meanings, and with it, the need to develop morphological awareness in the L2
would become more realized. She characterizes morphological awareness as the ability to
Related Studies
awareness of the morphological structure of words has been found to be correlated with
vocabulary knowledge (Carlisle & Fleming, 2003; Nagy et al., 2003; Singson et al.,
2000). It has also been found that children with more advanced morphological awareness
have an advantage in acquiring new vocabulary (see Reed, 2008). For example, Freyd
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and Baron (1982) found that compared to average readers, good readers used derivational
rules more frequently and were faster at learning derived words. In another study,
Wysocki and Jenkins (1987) observed that sixth- and eighth-grade students were better
able to deduce the meaning of a root word (e.g., anxiety) than fourth-grade students, if
Studies and reviews of research over the past three decades have shown that the
Tereshinski, Kame’enui, & Olejnik, 2002; Beck, Perfetti, & McKeown, 1922;
In their studies on children’s literacy development, Dr. John Kirby and Ph.D.
student Peter Browers find that morphology improves vocabulary acquisition, spelling,
However, in a study with third and fifth grade students, Carlisle (2000) showed
that learners are less able to recognize morphologocal cues in “shift words” that have
changes in pronunciation and/or spelling due to suffixing patterns across related forms.
Pressley, Disney, and Anderson (2007) reviewed the evidence for the value of
teaching internal context cues (morphological word parts) for vocabulary development.
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Although they described the evidence so far as “thin and equivocal” (Pressley et.al.,
2007, p 214) they reported that there was some evidence that teaching about morphemes
can improve children’s and adult’s ability to infer the meanings of words.
Chapter 3
METHODS
Participants
Grade 11 students (GAS and ABM strand) of St. John Paul II College of Davao
were recruited for the study. There were a total of 40 participants. They were picked
randomly. There were 20 participants for each strand-ABM and GAS. There were 3
males and 17 females from ABM strand while there were 10 males and 10 females from
Instruments
The Nelson-Denny Reading Test (ND) was selected as a standardized test because it is
suitable for group. The ND is a well regarded instrument used both for research purposes
and for assessment of reading progress in schools and in clinical settings (Masterson &
Hayes, 2004). Standardization of the test was done from 1991 to 1992, and the college-
level sample included over 5,000 students from 38 four-year universities (Brown, Fishco,
& Hannah, 1993). Standard administration includes a 15-minute vocabulary section with
choice question in the vocabulary and comprehension sections has five answer choices.
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The test for measuring morphology skill contained four sections, which were called
language preference both in speaking and reading as well as their speech and reading
problem. Each section starting Subtest 1 required a response to the same list of 50
Questions 1 and 2 is all about their language preference in speaking and reading.
Questions 3-7 is about their current reading and vocabulary levels. Questions 8-11 will be
all about their language and reading background. Lastly, questions 12-14 will be all about
For Subtest 1: Checklist, participants were given the list of 50 complex words, and asked
to place a check next to the words they know. The instructions included “check yes if you
could use the word in a sentence.” In everyday parlance, knowing a word means
recognizing its meaning, and the superficial purpose of Subtest 1 was simply to obtain a
yes-or-no response for this level of knowing each word. The less obvious purpose was to
gain access to a deeper level of knowledge in later steps of the test. A thorough
knowledge is usually implicit, but can be made explicit by the sequence of Subtest 1:
In Subtest 2: Morphology Skill, the participants were asked to identify the simpler word
that is morphologically related to each of the complex words (as shown in the example
above). By itself, the score for Subtest 2 would represent the student’s basic knowledge
on Subtest 2 for only the words marked known on Subtest 1 represents the specific,
usually tacit knowledge of the derivational relationships of the particular test words. This
the definition of the target word had to be selected. A sample item from the third subtest
was
The score for Subtest 3: Definitions is simply a measure of knowledge of word meanings.
indicates whether or not the students actually know the meanings of the words they think
they know. In addition to the three-part morphology test, the participants were also asked
about the amount of reading they do, and if they had any language problems in school or
Scoring
For the morphology test, last three subtest scores were obtained. Starting with Subtest 1:
Checklist, the number of words checked as known was recorded. Scores for Subtest 2:
Morphology Skill, and Subtest 3: Definitions were the numbers of correct responses on
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each subtest. The responses to individual words on the three subtests allowed the scores
The MA score was calculated by counting the correct answers from Subtest 2:
Morphology Skill for words checked as known (on Subtest 1: Checklist). Similarly,
Accuracy scores were obtained by assigning one point for each correct definition from
Subtest 3: Definitions for each word checked as known (on Subtest 1: Checklist). As an
chose commend as the related word on Subtest 2: Morphology Skill, the student would be
credited with one point toward the Subtest 2 score, but would not earn credit for this
word on the MA score. Using the same procedures, if a student marked opacity as known,
but did not select the correct definition on Subtest 3: Definitions, no point would be