FROM WORD TO WORDS: AFFIXES MATTER

In an increasingly complex educational pursuit, language and literacy skills are the keys to success. Vocabulary knowledge is closely associated with students’ ability to decode words and read fluently as well as comprehend what they have read. Reading material in the content area can be one of the challenges faced by less proficient students
Knowing the grammar of vocabulary enables students to learn the rules that enable them to build up different forms of the word or even different words from that root word. This study will focus on the latter which is structural analysis focusing on word parts—prefixes, root words, suffixes, and derivational endings (for example, -y, -ly, -ial, and -ic). The ability of students to use word parts to interpret new words can contribute greatly to their vocabulary growth. Focusing on the morphological structure of words in a second language may assist learners in increasing their awareness of morphologically complex words which can be an important strategy of inferring and acquiring words.
In this study the morphological productivity is determined from the information gathered from the specialized corpus for chemical engineering program. Attention to specific academic vocabulary is a productive area of instruction and learning because many of these words belong to rich morphological families. The corpus created for the purpose of this study is named Chemical Engineering Level 1 (CEL1). This study looks at lexical words in the frequency list which include token and type frequencies and also morphological productivity of the affixes.