The impact of morphological awareness on Iranian University students’ listening comprehension ability

Abstract

This study examines the relationship between morphological awareness and listening comprehension ability in Iranian EFL learners. Morphological awareness refers to the learners’ knowledge of morphemes and morphemic structure, allowing them to reflect and manipulate morphological structure of words (Carlisle, 1995; Carlisle & Stone, 2003). The subject pool of this study consisted of 40 students (25 females and 15 males). They were second semester students majoring in English Language Teaching at Hamedan Branch, Islamic Azad University. They were randomly divided into two groups of 20 subjects, Control and Experimental groups. Four short listening passages were used as the pre-test which included 30 tokens of words with morphemic structures. The results of the pre-test revealed no significant difference between two groups. Then four one hour sessions were held for the experimental group. After four sessions, four short listening passages were used as the post-test. The results of the independent-sample t-test showed a significant difference between the two groups. The findings reflect the relationship between morphological awareness and listening comprehension ability. These findings may have some implications for explicit instruction on morphological knowledge.