A STUDY ON THE MORPHOLOGICAL AWARENESS OF INTERMEDIATE LEVEL ADULT TURKISH EFL LEARNERS

The purpose of the current study was to investigate morphological awareness of a group of intermediate level adult Turkish EFL learners. The participants of this study were 168 Turkish first year university students who were taking intermediate level English courses at a state university in Turkey. Morphological Awareness Test (MAT) was the data collection instrument of the study. MAT consists of two sections: Sentence Completion and Word Relation. The Sentence Completion section consists of 27 multiple-choice test items with the purpose of understanding whether the participants are aware of the grammatical and lexical functions of some common derivational suffixes in English. In the Word Relation section, the participants were provided with a list of 20 word pairs (real words), and asked whether the second word in each pair comes from the first word or not. For analyzing the data, first the descriptive statistics (mean scores and standard deviations) were calculated for the sections of MAT and for individual suffixes, then the comparisons between the sections and among the participants were made by using paired-samples t-tests and one-way repeated measures ANOVAs. Results of the study indicated that intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners participating in the present study had moderate to high morphological awareness; they performed better in the Word Relation task than in the Sentence Completion task; and they showed the best performance in the verb making suffixes.


INTRODUCTION
In a meta-analysis on L2 reading comprehension and its correlates, Jeon and Yamashita (2014) list ten key L2 reading component variables: L2 decoding, L2 vocabulary knowledge, L2 grammar knowledge, L1 reading comprehension, L2 phonological awareness, L2 orthographic awareness, L2 listening comprehension, working memory, metacognition, and L2 morphological awareness.Koda (2005) maintains that word knowledge is formulated in specific contexts, from which extracting lexical information is an acquired competence that contributes to reading comprehension, as already mentioned in this study.However, it is crucial to understand the internal structure of the words to be able to extract lexical information.Koda (2005) further maintains, "in-depth awareness of such structural awareness can point up the essential competencies underlying word-knowledge accretion through reading" (p.71).In this sense, metalinguistic awareness, which refers to "the ability to identify, analyze, and manipulate language forms" (Koda, 2005: 72), plays an important role in reading development.It is Vol 3. No. 2, December 2017 ISSN : 2460-7142   66 worth mentioning that metalinguistic awareness differs from linguistic awareness in the sense that it requires a general understanding of language, regardless of its specific details (Koda, 2005).As it is believed that learning to read involves the recognition of important elements of spoken language and their relation to the writing system of a language, and thus metalinguistic, there has been a boost in research on metalinguistic awareness recently (Koda, 2005).Morphological knowledge, a type of intra-word knowledge, and morphological awareness, a type of metalinguistic awareness, has gained importance accordingly.
Metalinguistic awareness has been increasingly found to be beneficial for L2 reading comprehension (Kieffer & Lesaux, 2012).The purpose of the current study is to investigate morphological awareness of a group of intermediate level adult Turkish EFL learners.

The research question of the study is as follows:
To what extent intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners are aware of syntactic and lexical functions of certain suffixes in English?
Morphological awareness refers to "the ability to reflect on and manipulate morphemes and word formation rules in a language" (Kuo & Anderson, 2006:161).In other words, it is the ability to recognize the internal structure of a word, identify the root and the affixes as well as being able to form new words applying the word formation rules in a particular language.
The interest in morphological awareness and its contribution to reading achievement surged thanks to the realization that English is a morphophonemic language.Previous to this surge in interest in morphological awareness, phonological awareness, which is defined as the ability to analyze the sound structure of words (Apel& Werfel, 2014), was once a major topic in reading research as its explicit teaching was found to have a facilitating effect on reading achievement in the pre-school and early elementary school years.Therefore, studies investigating these facilitating effects of phonological awareness scaled up.However, it was later noticed that despite the incontestable contribution of phonemic awareness to literacy and reading skills, it cannot be identified as the single most important predictor of reading achievement as literacy is naturally complex and multifaceted.Afterwards, it was recognized that morphological structure, as well as phonological structure, is an essential component of English language.
Research shows that in one way or another learners of a language are likely to benefit from morphological awareness, which entails its implementation in a language classroom.and asked to brainstorm all the other multimorphemic words coming from the same base word (such as action, actor, actress, acting).The same process can be repeated with roots (such as vert, which means "to turn in some direction") and learners may come up with all the other related words (such as introvert, introverted, extrovert, extroverted, convert, conversion).

Participants
The participants of this study were 168 English with an integrated approach to foreign language learning in which English was taught in a way in which language skills and subskills are interwoven, and students are encouraged to learn these skills simultaneously.

Data Collection and Analysis
During the administration of MAT, the participants were not told that the words used in the Sentence Completion section were pseudowords, they were told that the words were new to them, and they were reminded to use their knowledge of word endings (suffixes) to be able accomplish the test.For analyzing the data, first

RESULTS
There ISSN : 2460-7142   71 Table 4 and Table 5 present the mean scores and their comparisons for the three noun making suffixes, the highest possible score for each suffix was 3 as there were three items in MAT related to each suffix.The tables indicate that the participants got the highest mean score from -tion, and it was followed by -ist and -ty, and there was a statistically significant difference in all pairwise comparisons.
Table 6 and Table 7 show the mean scores and their comparisons for the three verb making suffixes, again the highest possible score for each suffix was 3 as there were three items in MAT related to each suffix.The tables indicate that the participants got the highest mean score from -ate, and it was followed by -ize and -fy, and there was a statistically significant difference in all pairwise comparisons.This indicates that they need to be provided with a wider array of suffixes profoundly to be more proficient in identifying word structure and forming new words in English.In other words, Turkish EFL learners should be provided with derivational suffixes broadly and deeply to achieve the goal of comprehending and benefitting from intra-word structure in English.

Morphological
Awareness Test (MAT) was the data collection instrument of the study.MAT consists of two sections: Sentence Completion and Word Relation.The Sentence Completion section consists of 27 multiplechoice test items.The purpose of this section is to understand whether the participants are aware of the grammatical and lexical functions of some common derivational suffixes in English.The target words used in this section are pseudowords that are appropriate for the morphological structure of English.The derivational suffixes used in this test are -tion, -ist, -(i)ty (nounmaking suffixes); -ate, -ize, -fy (verb-making suffixes); and -ous, -ive, -al (adjective-making suffixes).These suffixes have been selected for the test because they are among the very common suffixes in English (White, Sowel & Yanagihara, 1999; Fry & Kress, 2006); -tion, -(i)ty, -ous, -ive and -al are among the most common 20 suffixes that account for 93 percent of occurrences according to a research-based list by White, Sowel, and Yanagihara (1999); andist, -ate, -ize and -fy are among other common suffixes that account for seven percent of the occurrences.The test items in the Sentence Completion section have been taken from Mahony (1993) with minor adjustments.The participants were instructed to choose the best word out of four options formed with the same root (a pseudoword) but different suffixes in order to complete a sentence with a blank.As can be seen in the following sample test item (Figure 1), once a learner knows what functions the derivational suffixes -ize, -ive, -al and -tion serve, as listed in the options respectively, they can easily complete the sentence with the correct form of the word, indicating that they have some insights into English derivational morphology.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Sample Test Item from the Sentence Completion Section of MAT In the Word Relation section, the participants were provided with a list of 20 word pairs (real words), and asked whether the second word in each pair comes from the first word or not.As the following sample test items displays (Figure 2), after reading each word pair the

Figure 2 .
Figure 2. Sample Test Item from the Word Relation Section of MAT Expert opinion of four professors from the English Language Teaching department of the same university were taken for ensuring the validity of MAT for this research purpose and context; Cronbach's alpha coefficient of MAT was found to be .86for this study, which indicates a high internal reliability.
were calculated for the sections of MAT and for individual suffixes, then the comparisons between the sections and among the participants were made by using paired-samples t-tests and one-way repeated measures ANOVAs.
have a superficial knowledge of intra-word structure in English.Also, intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners participating in the present study showed the best performance in the verb making suffixes.We expected the best performance in the case of noun making derivational suffixes since they are considered as the simplest among the parts of speech and thus the first ones taught to students in primary school.However, this finding remarks that Turkish EFL learners might be making use of verb making derivational suffixes more frequently than any others; they might often encounter and be engaged in verb making derivational suffixes and thus are more familiar with and aware of their lexical and grammatical functions.The participants scored the most poorly in the case of adjective making ISSN : 2460-7142 73 derivational suffixes, which might be explained by that foreign language learners generally encounter with and use nouns and verbs more than the other parts of speech.Lastly, intermediate-level adult Turkish EFL learners participating in the present study showed significantly more awareness for the verb making derivational suffix -ate thanizeand -fy.They showed significantly more awareness for the noun making derivational suffix -tion than -ty and -ist.They showed significantly more awareness for the adjective making derivational suffix -al than -iveandous.This differentiation of the performance of the participants in terms of the suffixes may also be attributed to their experience with suffixes and word formation through their studies at preparatory school and the course-books.One crucial thing that this finding signals is that Turkish EFL learners display different performance in recognizing and using suffixes properly in accordance with the individual suffixes even in the case of very common ones.