WORD ROOTS IN ENGLISH - LEARNING ENGLISH WORDS THROUGH FORM AND MEANING SIMILARITY by Wei Zheng A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Applied Linguistics Victoria University of Wellington 2011 Abstract The research first proposes a vocabulary learning technique: the word part technique, and then tests its effectiveness in aiding vocabulary learning and retention. The first part of the thesis centers around the idea that the knowledge of the first 2000 words language learners already possess may give them easier access to words of other frequency levels because the root parts of the low frequency new words share form and meaning similarities with the high frequency known words. The research addresses the issue at two stages: to quantify the information concerning the number of words able to be accessed through the analysis of the word roots, and to analyze the pedagogical usefulness of the accessible words. A Comprehensive Etymological Dictionary of the English Language (Klein, 1966) was used as the source to show the possible formal and meaning connections among words. All the words in the first 2000 word list were first looked up individually and all the cognates provided under each of these words were collected and placed under each of the high frequency words if they meet the requirement that their roots share more than one letter and/or more than one phoneme with the roots of the first 2000 known words. After the data was roughly gathered, three criteria were applied to filter the data, namely, the frequency criterion, the meaning criterion and form criterion. In applying the frequency criterion, words with frequency levels lower than the tenth thousand were removed from the data. In applying the meaning criterion, hints were given to show the semantic relations between the higher frequency words and the first 2000 thousand words. The hints were then rated on the scale for measuring meaning transparency. Words that were rated at level 5 on the scale were considered inaccessible; words that were rated at levels 1, 2a, 2b, 2c, and 3a were considered easy to access. In applying the form criterion, calculations were done for each semantically accessible word to show their phonological similarity and orthographic similarity in relation to the known word. The words whose phonological or orthographical similarity scores were larger than 0.5 were considered to be phonologically or orthographically easy to access. Finally the ii “find” function of Microsoft Word was used to check the data by picking up any words that might have been missed in the first round of data gathering. The above procedures resulted in 2156 word families that are able to be accessed through the meaning and form relations with the first 2000 words in their root parts. Among the 2156 word families, 739 can be accessed easily and are therefore more pedagogically useful and 259 can be accessed, but with difficulty. 21 pedagogically useful form constants were selected because they can give access to more unknown lower frequency words than other form constants. In the second part of the thesis, an experiment was conducted to test the effectiveness of the word part technique in comparison with the keyword technique and self-strategy learning. The results show that with the experienced Chinese EFL learners, the keyword technique is slightly inferior to the word part technique and the self-strategy learning. iii Acknowledgements I wish to extend my deepest gratitude towards my supervisors Professor Paul Nation and Professor Laurie Bauer for their guidance, inspiration and support. Especially, I would like to express warm thanks to my primary supervisor Paul Nation for his expert guidance on designing and writing the research and on thought processes. His continuous encouragement and patience has accompanied me through the past three rewarding years. I also feel fortunate and honored to be supervised by Professor Laurie Bauer. He introduced me to the new subject area of morphology. It is his insightful challenges, clear-headed comments and detailed reading of my first draft that has made my study a positive one. I am grateful to Victoria University Scholarships Committee for granting me the VUW PhD Scholarship which provided me financial support during my study. Special thanks also go to Dr Peter Gu and Dr Stuart Web for their friendly discussion and valuable advice on my research. I would like to express sincere appreciation to all the teachers and students who participated in the experiment. Without their assistance, the experimental study could not have been carried out. Finally, I would like to express my deepest thanks to my husband Cheng Gang and my Daughter Linlin for their understanding, support, tolerance and love. iv Table of contents Abstract……… ........................................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................................... iv Table of contents ......................................................................................................................................... v List of tables….. .......................................................................................................................................viii List of figures... ........................................................................................................................................... x Part One…….. ............................................................................................................................................ 3 Chapter 1 Introduction ..................................................................................................................... 1 1.1Motivation of the present research ................................................................................................. 1 1.2 The implications and applications of the research results ............................................................. 3 1.3 Organization of the study .............................................................................................................. 6 Chapter 2 Literature Review .................................................................................................................. 9 2.1 Morphological study of words and morphological knowledge in vocabulary growth .................. 9 2.1.1 The morpheme .................................................................................................................. 10 2.1.2 Mental representation of morphological structures ........................................................... 14 2.1.3 The study of English word parts ....................................................................................... 19 2.1.4 Research on L1 and L2 learners’ knowledge of derivational morphology ....................... 23 2.2 The etymological study of words and its application in language learning ................................ 27 2.2.1 Etymological information about English roots ................................................................. 27 2.2.2 Arguments for the value of etymological information in L2 vocabulary learning ............ 34 2.2.3 Research on the relationship between Latin study and vocabulary size in L1 learning .... 36 2.3 Vocabulary learning theory and factors affecting foreign vocabulary learnability ..................... 40 2.3.1 The levels of processing theory ........................................................................................ 40 2.3.2 Factors affecting foreign vocabulary learnability ............................................................. 42 2.3.2.1 Pronounceability ................................................................................................ 43 2.3.2.2 Orthography ....................................................................................................... 46 2.3.2.3 Connecting form to meaning .............................................................................. 46 2.4 Summary ..................................................................................................................................... 50 Chapter 3 Instruments .......................................................................................................................... 51 3.1 Measuring spoken similarity between new words and known words ......................................... 51 3.1.1 Binary comparison vs. multi-valued comparison .............................................................. 52 3.1.2 A model for predicting the judged spoken form similarity ............................................... 53 3.1.3 The method for this study ................................................................................................. 57 3.1.4 Modifications to the phonemic model .............................................................................. 59 3.2 Measuring written similarity between known words and new words ......................................... 60 3.2.1 The substitution of a single letter ...................................................................................... 62 3.2.2 The substitution of a single letter vs. having one or two neighbor letters removed .......... 62 3.2.3 Addition or deletion of one letter .....................................................................................