Effects of teaching derivational morphology on lexical competence

Abstract

The study about how the teaching of the derivational morphology of the mother tongue feeds back into lexical competence is a topic that is not evident in the case of Spanish. Secondary school textbooks reflect a repetitive morphology teaching with little focus on connecting words and favoring vocabulary expansion. The aim of this research is, using a quantitative methodology, to measure the impact that relational knowledge of morphology has on lexical recognition in order to assess the cost-effectiveness of the teaching and to justify the demand for methodological changes in didactics. A total of 144 secondary school students participated in the study. They performed two receptive tasks of morphological judgment with a total of 87 simple and derived words selected according to criteria of morpholexical transparency and frequency. Descriptive statistics were applied to assess performance in the tasks according to grade, the 1-factor Anova test together with the a posteriori paired contrast test to measure the significance of the differences between averages and R2 to express the effect size. The results show a lack of gradual upward progression according to courses in the performance of both tasks and absence of statistical significance in the contrast of variables (tasks and courses). There is no positive correlation between relational knowledge of morphology and school year; therefore, the effects of morphology teaching on lexical competence are poor and deep procedural changes should be considered to make the didactic process profitable.