The Effect of Formal Teaching of Morphological Rules on EFL Learners’ Reading Comprehension and Guessing the meaning of Derivative Words

The purpose of the present study was investigating the effect of formal training of morphological rules on reading comprehension and guessing the meaning of derivative lexical items. The subjects participated in this study were 30 intermediate EFL students. They were divided into two groups of control and experimental and received pretest of reading comprehension and guessing the meaning of derivative words. The control group received traditional training and the experimental group received formal training of morphological rules for 15 sessions. Then they were given posttests. The scores analyzed using SPSS. The results showed that in the experimental group the differences between performance in the pretest and the posttest of reading comprehension and guessing the meaning of derivative words were meaningful but that was not the case for there were meaningful differences in the posttest between the performances of the two groups in reading comprehension and guessing the meaning of derivative lexical items and the experimental group outperformed the control group

Keywords:

reading , guessing meaning , formal training , morphological rules , Iranian EFL learners