ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS 1 BEYOND WORDS Vol. 11 No.1 May 2023 Graduate School, Widya Mandala Catholic University Surabaya English Derivational Morphology: Challenges and Teaching Considerations for Non-Na- tive Speakers Brenda Vargas-Vega brenda.vargas@uaq.mx Faculty of Languages Autonomous University of Queretaro Mexico & Irasema Mora-Pablo imora@ugto.mx Language Department University of Guanajuato Mexico Article History Received: 25-11-2022 Reviewed: 30-6-2023 Accepted: Keywords: English as a Foreign Language, derivational morphology, suf- fixes, teaching. DOI Abstract This paper has a twofold purpose: to raise awareness on the complexity of the acquisition of English derivational mor- phology, and to suggest ways to approach its teaching in the language classroom. Understanding morphology is im- portant because of its impact on other areas of language; however, some authors posit that its explicit instruction is limited in schools. Based on a thorough but comprehensible description of English morphology, we present eight aspects that may be challenging for English Language Learners fol- lowed by pedagogical strategies to address them. This way, we hope to offer linguistic insights that can aid the teaching of English as a foreign language and close the gap between linguistic research and the classroom setting. Introduction Derivational morphology is a word for- mation process in which the addition of affixes creates new lexemes (e.g., generous- generos- ity). The main word formation processes in English are compounding, conversion and der- ivation (Lieber, 2005). Compounding occurs when two stems are put together to form a lex- eme (e.g., bus driver). Conversion, also known as zero-derivation and functional shift, refers to the syntactic and semantic change of a word that does not undergo a morphological change. Through this process, nouns frequently be- come verbs (e.g., Google- to google), verbs be- come nouns (e.g., to catch- a catch) and less frequently, adjectives become verbs (e.g., cool- to cool). In derivation, the creation of 2 NGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS new lexemes results from the addition of a der- ivational affix. For example, amaze (v) + the suffix -ment results in amazement (n). This pa- per focuses on suffixation, which is a central part of derivational morphology. In the last decade, researchers have shown growing interest towards the study of deriva- tional morphology because it has been sug- gested that it can aid other areas of language. Studies of English as a second language have found benefits on word recognition, word read- ing, reading comprehension, and even writing skills resulting from the knowledge of deriva- tional morphology (Curinga, 2013; Diependaele et al., 2011; Khodadoust et al., 2013; Kieffer & Lesaux, 2008, 2012; Leontjev et al., 2016; Ramírez et al., 2010, 2013). De- spite the importance of the matter, it seems that teaching morphology has not been fully incor- porated in the curriculum. In what follows, we will present some evidence. Although several researchers recommend the explicit instruction of English derivational morphology (Amirjalili & Jabbari, 2018; Khodadoust et al., 2013; Schmitt and Zimmer- man, 2002; Varatharajoo et al., 2015), some other studies reveal that derivational morphol- ogy is not seriously considered when it comes to teaching. Tahaineh (2012) argues that word formation mechanisms are seen as a by-prod- uct of other types of learning and that it plays a secondary role compared, for instance, to grammar. He insists on the importance of teaching vocabulary in ways that promote learners’ true understanding of the linguistic system and explicitly teaches them word for- mation mechanisms since, without such in- struction, students are forced to memorize word forms which appear to be unrelated. He bases his arguments on a detailed analysis of a textbook of English as a second language in Jordan, where he found almost no activities re- lated to word-formation processes and there- fore he urges textbook designers to pay atten- tion to this aspect. The lack of morphological instruction has also been identified by Itmeizeh (2018), Badawi (2019) and Anwar & Rosa (2020). Itmeizeh (2018) studied Palestinian 10th grad- ers’ morphological analysis and found low re- sults even after the experimental group had gone through morphological treatment. The author states that English is taught in Palestine with special emphasis on listening and speak- ing in the first grades and gradually focuses on reading and writing in higher grades (never on morphology). Badawi’s (2019) study took place in Egypt where, he states, English in- struction is totally dominated by Communica- tive Language Teaching. He believes that this approach has been misunderstood, making teachers and material developers believe that they should leave aside any focus on language form. After visiting 51 EFL classrooms in 17 secondary schools, he observed that “neither the objectives nor the content of the three as- signed EFL secondary school textbooks are concerned with morphology instruction” (p.167). Likewise, Anwar & Rosa (2020) as- sert that “it is rare to find English teachers at junior high schools in Indonesia who teach morphology explicitly in the classroom” (p.29). These classroom practices seem to contra- dict some research findings that highlight the benefits of understanding morphology for bi- lingual people. Based on the idea that students bring skills from their first language to the learning of a second language, Lam et al. (2019) investigated a type of morphological awareness specific to bilinguals: cross-lan- guage suffix correspondences; this is, ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS 3 “awareness that suffixes can carry the same meaning and changes in grammatical class in two languages despite differences in appear- ance or sound in the two languages” (p. 30). This is not the same as cognate awareness, which commonly focuses on base forms like fantastic/fantástico in English and Spanish, re- spectively, but can also apply to suffixes alone (like English –ous and Spanish –oso in danger- ous/peligroso). Cross-language suffix corre- spondences, unlike cognate awareness, refers to a semantic and grammatical overlap where word forms do NOT share orthography or pho- nology, as in the pairs of English-Spanish words happiness/felicidad and loneliness/sole- dad. Lam et al. (2019) found that cross-linguis- tic suffix correspondence brought more bene- fits in reading comprehension than cognate awareness for English speakers learning French as a second language. Their study raises two important issues, one is that teachers should not treat bilingual students as monolin- guals; in other words, teachers could and should take advantage of students’ metalin- guistic awareness in their two (or more) lan- guages. Furthermore, if cross-language suffix correspondence is more beneficial than cog- nate awareness for reading comprehension in a second language, then we have at least one well founded reason to teach derivational mor- phology on its own right, and not as a by-prod- uct of vocabulary learning, grammar instruc- tion or reading exposure. We have presented some efforts that re- searchers have made to explore the importance of derivational morphology for second language learners, and what we find is a dis- crepancy between their findings and the class- room situation. In other words, although mor- phological knowledge is known to have a pos- itive impact on other areas of language, its ex- plicit instruction seems to be limited. We wish to close this gap by providing some teaching strategies based on concrete aspects of mor- phological knowledge. Our objectives are 1) to raise awareness on the complexity of the acqui- sition of English derivational morphology, and 2) to suggest ways to approach its teaching in the second language classroom. Our methodology consisted of describing eight potential problematic areas for students’ L2 morphological acquisition and treat those problems as teaching challenges in order to give pedagogical suggestions. The problems include: the processes involved in derivation, suffixes that can be both inflectional and deri- vational, pseudo-affixation, plurifunctional suffixes, meaning overlap, doublets, affix or- dering and the difference between academic and non-academic language. The relevance of the study is its attempt to link theory to practice in the field of Second Language Acquisition by offering linguistic insights that can aid the teaching of English as a Foreign language. We now turn to the description of eight problems of derivational morphology and then delve into some possible suggestions about how to deal with them in the classroom. The suggestions can apply to learners of different levels of proficiency and some recommenda- tions can be taken not only for classroom prac- tice, but also for testing purposes. 4 NGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS Challenges of English Derivational Morphology Problem 1: The three processes in- volved in derivation are not always visible It is claimed that derivation includes three simultaneous processes: a morphological one (the addition of a morpheme), a syntactic one (the change of a grammatical category) and a semantic one (the creation of a new meaning). Hurford et al. (2007) demonstrate this with a couple of examples (see Table 1, examples 1 and 2). Table 1 The three processes involved in derivation (source: Hurford et al. (2007) Morphological process Syntactic pro- cess Semantic pro- cess (1) Teach-teacher Add suffix -er Change verb to noun Produce a word de- noting an agent (2) Red-redness Add suffix -ness Change adjective to noun Produce a word de- noting a property However, these three processes are not al- ways visible. Although derivational morphol- ogy, in contrast to inflectional morphology, generally changes the grammatical category of the word, sometimes the result of adding a suf- fix is a derived word with the same grammati- cal category (see 3), where we can see the ad- dition of the suffix –hood, but the derived word is also a noun. Similarly, we can find examples of derivation which do not involve a morpho- logical process as in cook (n) or (v), whose syn- tactic and semantic processes can only be dis- tinguished in context (see 4a and b). (3) child (n) → childhood (n). (4a) The cook was granted a prize (n). (4b) I don’t like to cook (v). In a classroom situation, we could deal with cases like (3) by explaining the syntactic process of the suffixes (for example, that the suffix -hood makes nouns) and give and elicit some examples from students (e.g., neighborhood, brotherhood). Cases like (4) can be managed by indicating the possible syntac- tic combinations of the grammatical catego- ries. For example, nouns can be preceded by determiners such as a house, the cats, three cooks, while verbs in infinitive are preceded by the particle to or by a noun phrase or an auxil- iary verb, when conjugated. Compare three cooks (n) vs my mom cooks well (v) / my mom is cooking. Some of the words that do not suffer a morphological change present an additional problem related to stress shift. The word report in (5a) and (5b) below serves as an example. Generally, when these words work as nouns, the stress goes on the first syllable, and when they work as verbs, it is the second syllable that is stressed (RE-cord vs re-CORD)1. A quick explanation of stress to students may also give them clues to identify grammatical categories. 1 More examples of this type of words are: increase, decrease, import, export, protest, insult, etc. ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS 5 In addition, teachers can explain the dif- ference between nouns and verbs by giving pairs of sentences and creating wh- questions with the help of students. (5a) The report was prepared by the direc- tor. (Who prepared the report?) (5b) They report that soil pollution has threatened local farmers. (What did they re- port?) Problem 2: Is this a derivational or an inflectional morpheme? There are some morphemes that can be ei- ther derivational or inflectional. For example, if you add the suffix -er to an adjective, you create a comparative form, so the suffix is in- flectional (see 6); but if you add it to a verb, you create a noun, thus it is working as a deri- vational morpheme (see 7). (6) cheap → cheaper (inflectional mor- pheme) (7) paint → painter (derivational mor- pheme) Bauer & Nation (1993), who propose a scale of difficulty for learning English mor- phemes, suggest that inflectional morphemes are acquired earlier than derivational mor- phemes. Nonetheless, they point out that some can be considered either, depending on the context they appear in, as in (8a) and (8b)2: (8a) He is shooting clay-pigeons. (inflec- tional morpheme, progressive form). (8b) Clay-pigeon shooting is an expensive pastime (derivational morpheme denoting an activity). English teachers and second language re- searchers should be aware of the flexibility of the suffixes since students’ acquisition may in- deed follow this kind of broad order. Author 1 et al. (in revision) report that beginners tend to 2 Examples taken from Bauer & Nation (1993). use more inflectional morphemes than ad- vanced students and that sometimes their an- swers are correct even if the sentential context is restricted (see 9a and 9b). (9a) A more bearable life requires good attitude. (9b) A more bearing life requires good at- titude. The first option in (9) is, without a doubt, a derivational morpheme since the suffix -able creates adjectives, while the second option has an inflectional form (-ing) that in this context works well to form an adjective. Thus, the suf- fix –ing can work as an inflectional morpheme by giving a progressive aspect (see 8a above and 10a below); as a derivational morpheme by naming an activity and working as a noun (see 8b above and 10b below) and even denoting a “type of”, thus working as an adjective (see 10c below). However, the addition of -ing as a derivational morpheme can have ambiguous readings as in (10d)3, where one interpretation refers to the act of smoking grass (verb), and another interpretation is the state of the grass (adjective). (10a) She is smoking. (the verb is inflected with the suffix -ing). (10b) Smoking is bad for your health. (-ing works as a nominalizer and thus, considered a derivational morpheme). (10c) Some smoking pipes are not expen- sive. (Smoking pipes are a type of pipes, so the suffix -ing is adjectival and is thus considered a derivational morpheme). (10d) Smoking grass is dangerous. (Am- biguous case). Teachers can make inferences as to the process of acquisition of their students based on their answers. If a student answers 3 Example taken from Hurford et al. (2007). 6 NGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS something like 9a, that may mean that he/she has a greater level of English proficiency than the student that answers something like 9b. In this case, the teacher knows that he/she has to work harder with the latter. One way to do this is to present the derived form to the student and make him/her aware of the function of the der- ivational morpheme. For example, by explain- ing that the suffix -able can attach to verbs to form adjectives (e.g., observable, respectable, unthinkable). Problem 3: Pseudo-affixes and the three as- pects of derivational knowledge There are words whose endings resemble the form of some suffixes although they are not real suffixes, but part of the base of the word. This phenomenon can be problematic for lan- guage learners, as Diependaele et al. (2011) suggest. These researchers found a pattern of facilitation from transparent suffixes such as viewer-view to opaque suffixes or pseudo-suf- fixes such as corner-corn. This finding goes in line with Tyler & Nagy’s (1989) assertion that derivational knowledge includes three aspects: relational, syntactic, and distributional, and is developed accordingly. In the first type of knowledge, leaners have to decide if two words are related as in argue-argument as opposed to off-offer. The second aspect, called the syntactic knowledge, consists of knowing that deriva- tional suffixes mark the grammatical category of English words; for example, being aware that the suffix -ize creates verbs like in victim- victimize. Finally, the third aspect is about knowing the restrictions of the addition of a suffix to certain roots. For example, the nominalizer -ness can be added to adjectives and nouns but not to verbs (e.g., quietness, childness vs *playness). The problem of pseudo-suffixes has also been addressed by Schreuder & Baayen (1995), who point out that some of the factors that must be considered in the development of morphological acquisition are: conceptual complexity, semantic and phonological trans- parency, the complexity of the operations of word formation, pseudo-affixation and affixal homophony. Other non-morphological factors that the authors invite us to consider are word frequency and the morphological richness of languages, since they can create differences in acquisition, too. A pseudo-suffix is explained by Ram (2013) as something that is not a suffix, but a combination that looks like a suffix, like -er in corner. A more general term would be pseudo- affixation, as Schreuder & Baayen (1995) use it, because it can also occur with prefixes, as they exemplify with the words reach and react. While the word reach has no prefix, the word react includes the prefix re-. These authors warn us about word frequency because a high frequency word may be easier to acquire than a low frequency word, even if it is derived (for example, the word punishment in English is more frequent than the word punish4). Also, the morphological richness of the first lan- guage may affect the acquisition of the second language. For example, it may be easier for a Russian speaker to understand inflection in Spanish than for an English speaker, since Russian and Spanish have a rich inflectional system, but English does not. Teachers can take advantage of research that has been done regarding the different aspects 4 Punishment has 2191 ocurrences in the British Na- tional Corpus, while punish has 461 (January 30th, 2021) of derivational knowledge. For example, Car- lisle (2000) developed a way to test the ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS 7 relational and the syntactic knowledge of Eng- lish native speakers that can be used with nonnative speakers and be further modified to evaluate their distributional knowledge. In her proposal, the relational knowledge is a judge- ment test, thus focusing on comprehension (see 14a and 14b); while the evaluation of the syn- tactic knowledge is divided in two parts: deri- vation and decomposition (see 15 and 16, re- spectively) and evaluates production. In doing so, the last two tasks also trigger semantic knowledge. Both in derivation and decomposi- tion, the students are asked to complete sen- tences by modifying a given word. Author 1 et al. (2019) adapted Carlisle’s derivation task and were able to successfully evaluate Spanish speakers’ distributional knowledge of some English suffixes. (14a) happy – happiness (related) (14b) cat – category (not related) (15). Farm. My uncle is a … [farmer] (16). Driver. Children are too young to... [drive] The type of exercises shown in 14 to 16 can be used in the language classroom as prac- tice, and not only as evaluation tools. Morpho- logical exercises can be modified to prompt students’ comprehension and at a later stage, production, which tends to be poorer than the receptive area. For example, a decontextual- ized exercise aiming to develop the relational knowledge of students could be a morphologi- cal segmentation task of isolated words (e.g., cleverness → clever -ness; unreliability → un- rely -able - ity). This type of exercise makes students realize that the addition of some suf- fixes modifies the root orthographically and/or phonologically. In the case of unreliability, there is a stress shift between reLY and relia- BIlity, plus orthographic changes: switching - y to -i in rely and modifying -able to -abil to fit with -ity; so this exercise can also benefit stu- dents’ spelling or pronunciation subskills. It is important to make clear that the segmentation should be morphological and not in syllables. If teachers prefer to work with contextual- ized material, they can use short texts and have students underline all the derived words (iden- tification). If students are able to identify the grammatical category of the derived words and guess meaning from context, they are showing their syntactic and semantic knowledge (com- prehension), which can be evaluated through comprehension questions. If students can use the derived words, they have moved to the pro- ductive area. This can be accomplished by elic- iting synonymous phrases (see 17). (17) Karla didn’t see the point of making an effort to convince her parents. Karla’s ef- forts to convince her parents seemed pointless to her. One same exercise can be adapted to trig- ger receptive and productive knowledge. Teachers can prepare multiple choice exercises where students choose the correct derived form to complete the sentences (see example 22 be- low). If they wish to move to the productive area, this same kind of sentences would be pre- sented in a fill in the blanks format (see 15 above). If teachers want to work only on the syntactic area, the exercise can look like exam- ple 20 below, but with real words. A less controlled production in communi- cative activities can be achieved by connecting morphology to other areas of language. For ex- ample, after a listening activity, teachers can lead an oral exercise that forces students to re- phrase ideas and use derived words. By doing so, teachers can check listening comprehen- sion and promote the development of morphol- ogy and grammar at the same time. The listen- ing activities are regularly included in the 8 NGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS textbooks, so the teacher would only be adding the morphological part (see dialogue and fol- low-up in 18, as an example). (18) [An extract of a dialogue between a boss and one of his employees] Boss: I’m sorry, but you will not be pro- moted this year. Employee: May I ask why? Teacher’s question: What were the boss and the employee talking about? Student’s expected response: about the employee’s promotion. Free production can be attained by asking students to write a short text with a minimum number of derived words to make it look more academic. It is also possible that more ad- vanced students start adding known suffixes to new roots both in spoken and written speech. Sometimes, students that have encountered words like homeless, pointless, and childless are able to produce words like motherless, meaningless or effortless. Problem 4: Plurifunctional morphemes Some morphemes have more than one grammatical category, and therefore, create different meanings. For example, the suffix -al can form adjectives from nouns (see 19a), nouns from verbs (see 19b), and adjectives from adjectives (see 19c). (19a) music (n) → musical (adj) (19b) arrive (v)→ arrival (n) (19c) periodic (adj) → periodical (adj) When this happens, generally one gram- matical category is more productive than the rest. In the case of the suffix -al, it has been claimed that the function of denominal adjecti- vizer (example 19a) is the most productive. This can have a positive impact on acquisition since the most productive function of a mor- pheme is thought to be the first one to be ac- quired by second language learners. However, teachers cannot be certain that the derivational suffix -al has been acquired because students are able to recognize it or produce it in a word such as musical, since the high frequency of this word and/or the frequency of its root (mu- sic) may have an effect on its recognition. As a matter of fact, some researchers claim that cer- tain derived words are recognized as a whole and not understood in a compositional manner because of their high frequency (Clahsen et al., 2010; Karlsson, 2015; Schreuder & Baayen 1995; Silva & Clahsen, 2008). Others alert us on the fact that knowing one derivative form of a word family does not mean knowing them all, although it may facilitate the receptive knowledge of other members. In Schmitt and Zimmerman’s words: “teachers cannot assume that learners will absorb the derivative forms of a word family automatically from expo- sure”. (2002, p. 162). The recommendation here is to try to sep- arate vocabulary knowledge from morpholog- ical knowledge. One way to do this is by test- ing students’ derivational knowledge in low and high frequency words. If the students only get good results in high frequency words, this means that they are not decomposing the words, and therefore, may not know the mor- phemes involved in them. Another way to evaluate morphological knowledge is by using non-words. The inconvenience of it is that it only evaluates the syntactic knowledge of the suffix, leaving aside its distributional knowledge (discussed in problem 3) and the possibility of doublets (discussed in problem 6). In addition, it focuses only on receptive knowledge. Mochizuki & Aizawa (2000) used this technique in a decontextualized multiple- choice format with the grammatical categories noun, verb, adjective and adverb as options (see 20), while in Lardiere’s study (2006) the options were words to complete a sentence (see ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS 9 21). This last author also included real words in her study (see 22), which would be our rec- ommendation for teachers who want to evalu- ate the syntactic knowledge of the suffixes be- cause we believe that working with non-words is not equivalent to working with real words. (205) Rombortable quifable slomita- ble n. v. a.ad. (21) The committee is too ____________ to deal with that project. a. vorincible b. vorintism c. vorintious- ness d. vorincify (22) I tried to ____________ his motives for doing that. a. analysis b. analytical c. analyse d. ana- lytically One way to teach smoothly the several functions of suffixes is to work first with those that have some correspondence with students’ L1. The creation of bilingual dictionaries can trigger students’ knowledge and comprehen- sion in both their L1 and L2 by means of com- parison. If students detect a pattern between suffixes in different languages either through cognates or cross-linguistic suffix correspond- ences, the teacher can elicit other forms that fit into that pattern, and the class can start its dic- tionary. For example, students notice that re- sponsibility matches with responsabilidad in Spanish and search additional pairs such as sin- cerity/sinceridad, authority/autoridad, mental- ity/mentalidad. Or they notice that the English suffix -al is cognate with Spanish. It is then the teacher’s job to make students realize that the cognate status holds only when -al forms ad- jectives from nouns as in natural and cultural, in which the roots of the words are also cog- nates. When this suffix creates adjectives form 5 The options in Mochizaki & Aizawa’s study were orig- inally given in Japanese. In addition, they included an- other type of items to evaluate prefixes. This was like- wise done with the use of non-words, but their intention adjectives, the suffix will be different in Span- ish but consistent (rethorical/retórico; hysteri- cal/histérico; allegorical/alegórico). Once stu- dents recognize this, it is likely that they rap- idly increase their receptive vocabulary be- cause the roots of the words are cognates, and now students know that -al is forming adjec- tives. Finally, the nominalizing function of -al does not correspond so strongly to Spanish words neither in roots nor in a single suffix (ar- rival/llegada; proposal/propuesta; re- moval/eliminación; approval/ aprovación), so this will be probably the last function Spanish speakers acquire. If the en- tries of the dictionary are made by suffix, and not by word, students can add the functions of a morpheme as they discover them, so they can develop their morphological knowledge grad- ually and meaningfully. Problem 5: One meaning generated by dif- ferent morphemes An additional problem occurs when we find different morphemes with the same syn- tactic process that create the same semantic value. An example of this, cited in Lowie (1998), is the case of the suffixes -ation, -ment, -al and Ø, which are all deverbal nominalizers that create the meaning of “abstract result of an action” as in (23 a-d). (23a) expect → expectation (23b) resent → resentment (23c) approve → approval (23d) regret (v) → regret (n) Our recommendation would be to con- sider again the first language of the students because that may partially explain their choices. For example, English and Spanish have the cognate suffixes -ation/-ación and - was to test the semantic knowledge of the prefix. A sam- ple item is: Antislimad / antikiofic / antirachy with the options (a) human, (b) of antenna, (c) opposed, (d) an- cient. 10 NGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS ment/-miento (e.g.,proclamtion/proclamación; resentment/resentimiento). This may affect the order of acquisition of morphemes and teach- ers can expect the use of the cognate mor- phemes over the non-cognate. As a matter of fact, an overuse of this type of morphemes can occur as in using approvation instead of ap- proval. In this case, the teacher can infer that the student has already acquired the syntactic knowledge of the morpheme and is only strug- gling with the distributional one. Amirjalili & Jabbari (2018) tested the distributional knowledge as in example (24)6 (24) [In each set determine which word does not exist in English] a. childable b. equality c. characterize d. measureless [In the above test “childable” is an incor- rect word since -able cannot attach to nouns]. Teachers can complement this type of ex- ercise in a group discussion where he/she asks for the correct form of the incorrect words. Ex- ample: “So how do we call someone who be- haves like a child?” (childish), and further ex- plain that the suffixes -ish, and -able create ad- jectives, but -ish can be added to nouns (e.g., devilish, stylish, womanish) while -able is commonly added to verbs (e.g., printable, drinkable, laughable). Problem 6: The doublets Zacarías (2010) studies the Spanish suf- fixes -ción and -miento that add to the same root, create the same grammatical category and, in some cases, generate the same mean- ing. He calls rivalry when both derivations are possible for the same grammatical category as aburrición and aburrimiento (both forms 6 Example taken from Amirjalili & Jabbari (2018) 7 Zacarías argues that población means “human settle- ment” or “a group of inhabitants” while poblamiento re- fers to the activity of inhabiting. meaning boredom) and argues that there is op- posability when the meaning of the derived forms is different as in población and poblamiento7. This same phenomenon has been discovered in English. For example, Bauer et al. (2013) point out that it is common to find doublets with -ness and -ity (e.g., pu- rity/pureness; exclusivity/ exclusiveness). From a Second Language Acquisition perspec- tive, Author 1 et al. (2019) found that English learners have the tendency to add the English suffix -ation to roots that can take another nominalizer like -al or -y (e.g., dismission vs dismissal; advocation vs advocacy). They ar- gue that this preference is due to the greater productivity of the suffix -ation, the greater word frequency of the derived form, and the influence of the participants’ mother tongue, which in their study was Spanish and thus has the suffix -ación. They also found cases of op- posability like treatment vs treaty where, alt- hough both suffixes create a noun, the meaning of the derived form is quite different. Finally, they account for the creation of novel forms like adjournation instead of adjournment. The suggestion here is to correct beginner or intermediate students only when there is a difference in meaning that obstructs communi- cation (cases of opposability) and leave the deep explanations of subtle differences of meaning to advanced students (cases of ri- valry). This is because we believe that morpho- logical knowledge is more optimally linked to vocabulary size than vocabulary depth8. For advanced students, a meaningful and collaborative way to work with doublets is the creation of English-English dictionaries using 8 Vocabulary size is defined as the number of words known, while vocabulary depth refers to how well those words are known (Schmitt, 2014). ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS 11 peer feedback as a tool to increase morpholog- ical awareness. If after a fill in the blanks deri- vational exercise, the teacher sees that stu- dents’ answers for an item varies between treatment and treaty, but the correct answer is only treatment (a case of opposability), he/she can ask students to look up the meanings in a dictionary and write them down with a sample sentence for each word. This would force stu- dents to check the meaning of the word against the context which, as mentioned in Oz (2014), is a step to promote morphological awareness as a cognitive strategy. If the pair of words are a case of rivalry, students may also find exam- ples and have a group discussion to discover use or meaning differences between words. In this case, the teacher can explain that different users may use different forms; for example, some people prefer to use bravery over brave- ness. These variations may be a matter of gen- erational or dialectal preferences, sematic change (pejoration or amelioration), or caused by the etymological background of words, as mentioned in Kaunisto (2009). Problem 7: Derived words with more than one affix Some derived words do not contain only one affix but can be formed by a prefix plus a suffix (e.g., un-respons-ive), or a combination of suffixes. In the latter case, the order of the suffixes in not arbitrary. This is, while respons- ive-ness is accepted, *response-ness-ive is not. There is a large body of research in this area, especially theoretical, in which researchers have tried to categorize the suffixes to pre- dict/explain their ordering (e.g., Aronoff & Fuhrhop, 2002; Hay & Plag, 2004; Manova & Aronoff, 2010). The empirical work shows poorer performance of English Language 9 Examples form Friedline (2011) Learners on derived words that imply affix or- dering than those with a single suffix (Fried- line, 2011). Friedline’s (2011) ideas may be useful for developing the acquisition of multi-suffixed words, since one of his objectives was to see the role of instruction on suffix knowledge and suffix ordering, focusing on the following combinations: able+ity (e.g., reliability); ful+ness (e.g., hopefulness); tion+al (e.g., ad- ditional). The participants in Friedline’s study were pre-tested and post-tested after 5 sessions of morphological training. Some of the exer- cises included in the pretest and post-test were a fill in the blanks exercise that required the ad- dition of one or more suffixes to a given word (see 25 and 26) and a grammatical judgement task (see 27)9. (25) Brief: The speech‘s briefness was re- freshing. (26) Tough: The athlete‘s thoughfulness came from his intense training. (27) Truthfulness (correct) vs *forceness- ful (incorrect) He had two kinds of training that he called input and output training. Input training in- cluded multiple choice exercises after a listen- ing and a reading task, while output training did not include a listening task, and the activi- ties after the reading task required more pro- duction from students. Examples of the output training are shown in 28 and 29: (25) [After reading a short story] (26) People believe that Choice is a (base: sense) sensat __ __ n __ __ science fiction movie. (27) [Sentence writing] Politicians / lack / accountable / when /use / government money. (make changes to the 12 NGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS words provided in order to make them fit in the sentence and use accountable as a noun.) As we can see with the examples shown so far, morphological exercises can vary from a multiple choice to a fill in the blanks format or even to sentence transformation, and this can be done with multi suffixed words as well. It is also worth noticing that they can be done after practicing some other skills. We think that group games can further help practice word formation and affix ordering by, say, having students play dominoes with roots and affixes. Games have the advantage of making learners practice the language without the wor- ries of formal learning. Problem 8: Differences between academic and non-academic language We have seen that derivational suffixes tend to (but do not always) change the gram- matical category of the words to which they at- tach. However, we have not pointed out that derivational affixes add to content words, and when these are nouns, they are regularly com- mon nouns. It is strange to see derivational af- fixes added to function words such as conjunc- tions, articles or prepositions, which are con- sidered a closed set of words, since there is a fixed number of items. For example, it would be perfectly normal to see or hear the noun in- tensity formed by the adjective intense + the suffix -ity, but not *inity as the combination of preposition in + the suffix -ity. Van Goethem (2017) points out that occasionally words be- longing to the closed set can be used in nomi- nal slots as in (30) and that some category changes are nothing similar to what we can en- counter in a textbook (see 31). Other peculiar- ities are shown in Bochnak & Csipak’s (2014) work. Although these authors carried out a 10 Examples 30, 31 and 32b belong to Van Goethem (2017), while examples 32c and 32d are taken from semantic analysis not discussed in this paper, their examples show how the derivational suf- fix -ish changes its status from a bound to a free morpheme (see examples 32a-d and the expla- nation below the examples)10 (28) all the ifs, maybes, and wherefores of Survivor scramble-time politics. (29) (https://www.yahoo.com/, April 2016) (30) Ted: She said it’d take three days. It’s been five days. Should I be wor- ried? Lily: Oh, just play it cool. Don’t Ted out about it. Ted: Did you just use my name as a verb? Barney: Oh, yeah, we do that behind your back. Ted-out: to overthink. Also see Ted-up. Ted-up: to overthink something with disas- trous results. Sample sentence: Billy Tedded up when… Ted: OK, I get it. Don’t worry, I’m not gonna ted anything up or out. I’ll just give it a few more days. (How I Met your Mother, Season 1, Epi- sode 7, 2005, quoted in Mattiello 2013: 246) (32a) He was driven by his childish enthu- siasm. (32b) He said a fantastically Donald Trump-ish thing (32c) Let’s meet at Starbucks at 3-ish (32d) Mac: You’ve got a plan, right? Veronica: …ish In example 32a, -ish adds to nouns or ad- jectives, which is probably the most common use of this suffix and the most likely to be taught at schools. When the suffix adds to nouns, it creates adjectives that give the sense of “belonging to” (e.g., Spanish), “relating to”, “typical of” or “like” (e.g., childish, girlish, Bochnak & Csipak (2014). 32a is a made-up example by the authors of this paper. ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS 13 babyish); “inclined to” (e.g., bookish); or “ap- proximately” (e.g., fiftyish). When -ish adds to other adjectives, it also gives the meaning of approximation (e.g., yellowish, brownish). All these uses would be the typical ones, exempli- fied in 32a. However, example 32b shows that suffixation with -ish is not restricted to com- mon nouns, but also applies to proper names; 32c shows that the suffix can add to temporal expressions; and 32d shows that the suffix is evolving from bound to free morpheme. We doubt that uses such as 32 b-d are taught to sec- ond language learners despite being used by native speakers. This leaves teachers the task to complement their teaching materials with more natural instances of spoken language of both native and nonnative speakers. Recapitulation and teaching considerations This paper had a twofold purpose: to raise awareness on the complexity of the acquisition of English derivational morphology, and to suggest ways to approach its teaching in the language classroom. Throughout the text, we accounted for eight aspects of English deriva- tional morphology that may be problematic for non-native speakers of English. All of them have been dealt with in linguistic research, but scarcely taken to the classroom atmosphere. After each aspect, we provided the reader with some suggested activities that can be done as classroom practice or testing material. The im- plementation of such activities in class takes only a few minutes but can be greatly benefi- cial for students as it forces them to think and talk about language. Likewise, their applica- tion in testing may push students to develop metalinguistic awareness, and thus improve their language proficiency11. The teaching recommendations that we presented in the paper go in line with the thoughts of Tahaineh (2012), Itmeizeh (2018), Badawi’s (2019) and Anwar & Rosa (2020), who claim that morphological explicit instruc- tion is desirable, if not necessary, in the class- room setting. 11 Amirjalili & Jabbari (2018), Kieffer & Lesaux (2007, 2010) and Schmitt & Zimmerman (2002) offer With regard to teaching considerations, we would like to highlight the following as- pects: 1) Students' progress will be enhanced if they enjoy the activities they are performing (Agbayani, 2021). For this reason, we sug- gested activities in which teachers invite stu- dents to create their own materials (such as the dictionaries proposed in problems 4 and 6) and enjoy their learning through games (proposed in problem 7 when dealing with derived words with more than one affix). Bilingual dictionar- ies, as we mentioned, can be useful to identify the cross-language suffix correspondence pro- posed by Lam et al. (2019), while English- English dictionaries with 2) contextualized examples of derived words can be used as a device to work with doublets to promote morphological awareness, as stated by Oz (2014). In our view, teaching morphology is con- ceptually similar to teaching grammar: in es- sence, we want students to develop the ability to identify and relate how different affixes function, so they can assimilate the rules and focus on using the language. A problem-solv- ing approach to teaching and learning can be of great use in the language classroom, as it additional tools that can be adopted by teachers to build morphological understanding. 14 NGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS promotes learning as a process of self-discov- ery and meaningfulness. 3) In line with Karimi (2012) and Oz (2014), we believe that teaching morphology can aid students’ self-confidence as students might feel more at ease in learning the L2 if they are able to break down the word to a more understandable form. An aspect related to this point concerns the feelings of the students and the teachers, which should not be set aside. Teachers must attempt to create a safe environ- ment where students can receive feedback without feeling they are being put on the spot and where teachers feel comfortable to provide corrective feedback (CF). Author 2 et al. (2017) found scarcity of CF in spite of its ben- efits to second language learners. They argue that this may be because of the conflicting be- liefs that teachers and students have about it. Teachers should not be afraid of giving feed- back. Instead, they should make sure to create learning environments where students wel- come feedback and thus take advantage from it. 4) Teachers should also attempt real com- munication step by step, and they should al- ways consider factors such as the students’ age, learning experiences and proficiency level to design the most adequate and appealing ac- tivities. Again, we agree with Agbayani (2021), who states that students are more likely to comprehend a word if they are interested in what they are doing, so she emphasizes the im- portance of providing students with activities that attract their attention. We also highlight the value of context for learning and testing meaningfully since “morphemes have seman- tic, phonological and syntactic properties that clearly express the role of a particular word in its linguistic context” (Karimi, 2012, p. 452). 5) In addition, teachers need to observe what students do in the classroom in order to guide their learning. For example, in problem 1 (derivation is not always visible), we showed how a quick explanation of word stress can help students improve their pronunciation and develop their grammatical knowledge with lit- tle effort, while in problem 2 (derivational or inflectional morpheme), we emphasized that teachers must be attentive towards the knowledge students show through their an- swers. Given that a single task is insufficient to identify what the learner knows or does not know -just as the production of a correct word form does not mean that the learner knows the complete family of words (Schmitt and Zim- merman, 2022)-, teachers must be ready to ask relevant questions and/or provide the neces- sary assistance to help the learner advance. For this, the teacher needs to be a good observer, which will also be useful when dealing with word frequency (mentioned in problem 4: plu- rifunctional morphemes) if the teacher is inter- ested in developing morphological knowledge and not only assessing students’ vocabulary. The advantage of developing morphological awareness is that it can help students increase their vocabulary without having to memorize long lists of related words, as Tahaineh (2012) claims. Making in our students the habit of mentally decompose words may help them fig- ure out the meaning of new words when they encounter them. 6) From the introduction and then in prob- lems 3 (pseudo-affixes) and 5 (one meaning generated by different morphemes), we men- tioned the importance of considering the stu- dents’ mother tongue, as Lam et al. (2019) and Author 1 et al. (2019) suggest. This can occur, of course, only when the teacher is working with a group of students that shares the same first language. The relevance of the first lan- guage emerges because it allows students to ENGLISH MORPHOLOGY TO NON-NATIVE SPEAKERS 15 use their L1 metalinguistic knowledge and make comparisons between the L1 and the L2. 7) The pedagogical suggestions to prob- lem 3 (pseudo-affixes) show the variety of ways in which a teacher can work with mor- phology: form identification/comprehension to controlled or free production, with a wide range of exercises such as multiple choice, fill in the blanks, open questions, sentence trans- formation and writing assignments that allow teachers to connect morphological knowledge to other linguistic or communicative aspects of the target language. It is important, though, to select the correct type of exercises because some of them, although being apparently mor- phological, risk testing vocabulary knowledge instead, as the example (24) taken from Amir- jalili & Jabbari (2018) which supposedly tested the distributional knowledge of morphology. 8) Problems 7 (derived words with more than one affix) and 8 (differences between ac- ademic and non-academic language) make us think about language from a descriptivist view in contrast to a prescriptivist one because they discuss the way in which people really use lan- guage (not just in academic settings) and the innovative forms that may emerge. Regarding problem 7, we can point out that in addition to the ‘regular’ derived words, we can encounter compound nouns as bases to which both pre- fixes and suffixes can be added, like the word un-sportsman-like. This word is frequently used when narrating sports events, but words like this are probably never taught formally to students. Problem 8 highlights the need to pre- sent students with written material that shows a variety of registers in language use because through this, students will be exposed to differ- ences between oral and written English, aca- demic and everyday English, as well as native and nonnative English. This will additionally help reduce the stigma of taking the second language learners’ creative forms as mistakes, when the native speakers also produce them and are taken as acceptable. Authors like Au- thor 1 et al. (2019), Karlsson (2015) and Schmitt y Zimmerman (2002) have reported the creation of invented English words by nonnative speakers, and Schmitt y Zimmerman (2002) claim that even proficient speakers pro- duce them based on a partial knowledge of der- ivational morphology. 9) In conclusion, we invite teachers to ex- plicitly teach morphology, regardless of the strategies they decide to adopt, and to take into consideration the learners’ first language and previous knowledge. 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