Testing university students’ morphological awareness of English as a second-language

Abstract

The recent surge in the morphological awareness literature targeting ESL university students has two limitations: most studies come from Asia, and measures used lack validation within ESL university contexts. The present study expands ESL research towards Africa. We investigated whether linguistic measures of morphological knowledge, normed on monolingual American students, can produce reliable and valid scores when used among English second-language (ESL) students in Ghana. 454 ESL university students completed the Nonword Sentence Completion task (NWSC) and the Derivational Suffix Task (DST). Results show that the NWSC task, although relatively easy, proved a reliable and valid test for Ghanian ESL students. The DST was reliable, but not sufficiently valid. Additionally, morphosyntactic features of the test items were analysed in relation to the results. Our expectation that items with simple morphosyntactic characteristics are easier than those with complex morphosyntactic characteristics was not confirmed, suggesting that the effect of morphosyntactic variables on linguistic complexity in derived words (lexical density, word frequency, sentence length, levels of shift) may be due to the measurement tasks used in this study. The study proposes a framework as to how existing language tests (in any language), developed for L1 populations, can be normed in L2 regions.