The promotion of learners’ mental activity while studying Russian morphology

The object of the study is the methodology of teaching Russian morphology at secondary school. The subject matter of the research is the teaching potential of morphology for building a system of skills necessary for speech activity and the development of learners’ systematic thinking. The study aims to search for methodological factors that can enhance learners’ mental activity in the process of mastering the morphology of the Russian language. Theoretical research methods (analysis, synthesis, systematisation, generalisation of results) in conjunction with practical research methods (modelling the process of teaching morphology, learning process observation) are employed in the study. The paper examines theoretical sources, practices in teaching morphology at school and suggests ways to reverse negative trends in education. The relevance of the problem is highlighted, in the first place, by the fundamental importance of morphology for learners’ personality development. Secondly, it is emphasised by the fact that modern school-leavers lack the system of morphological skills. Lastly, negative trends in teaching this branch of linguistics as part of the school Russian course persist, which also underlines the relevance of the research. The study focuses on the theoretical aspects of the addressed problem and takes into consideration modern knowledge of psychology, psycholinguistics, linguistics, the methodology of teaching Russian. Additionally, the paper presents methods and techniques of teaching such difficult morphological topics as «The Pronoun», «The Participle», «The Numeral». It is concluded that problem-based learning is effective as its implementation will enable teachers to enhance their students’ mental activity in the process of cognition and optimise the outcomes of teaching Russian morphology at secondary school.

Young minds’ quest for regularity: Evidence from the Turkish causative

Children's remarkable ability to generalize beyond the input and the resulting overregularizations/ irregularizations provide a platform for a discussion of whether morphology learning uses analogy-based, rule-based, or statistical learning procedures. The present study, testing 115 children (aged 3 to 10) on an elicited production task, investigated the acquisition of the irregular distribution in the Turkish causative. Results showed that in early acquisition, to pin down the four causative suffixes, children engaged in comparisons between analogous exemplars. Thereafter to tackle the irregularity in two of the suffixes, children entertained competing hypotheses that yielded overregularizations and irregularizations. Overregularizations were instances of abstraction across the input based on type frequency; irregularizations were attempts to default to erroneous micro-generalizations. Negative correlation between errors and verb frequency suggested that recovery from errors was sensitive to token frequency. The overgeneralize-then-recover pattern that emerged in the acquisition of causative supported an integrated account of the roles of analogy, abstraction, and frequency in morphology learning.

Segmentation of root and pattern morphology

Morphology is the study of how form and meaning are combined to form complex words. While previous studies of morphology learning rely on semantic associations of continuous affixes (e.g., prefixes and suffixes), the present study focuses on the learnability of non-continuous (non-concatenative) forms, without the use of semantic information. We performed three artificial grammar learning experiments testing the types of information that adult, English speaking learners can extract from hearing words made up of CCC ‘roots’. In Experiment 1, participants were exposed to 24 CVCVC words made up of 12 CCC roots and four VV residues, repeated 15 times. In Experiments 2 and 3 the number of CCC items was increased to 72 (repeated five times), but with four additional templates (e.g., CVCCV in addition to CVCVC) in Experiment 2, and the addition of a prefix in Experiment 3. The results were parallel across all three experiments: participants could readily identify familiar items compared to both ungrammatical and novel grammatical items, and could correctly identify novel words compared to ungrammatical items, but only when the ungrammatical item was sufficiently different from the items heard in training. These results suggest that while learners can extract discontinuous information from lexical items, learners rely heavily on their memory for these lexical items, suggesting a possible bias against learning non-concatenative morphology.

Measuring Malaysian Students Achievement Level in Arabic Morphology: Improving and Developing Curriculum

This study aimed to identify the level of achievement of Malaysian students in Arabic Morphology material on three areas, previous study period, gender, and student education specialization. This research was a field research conducted on Malaysian students studying Arabic, at the International Islamic University Matriculation Center (IIUMC) in Kuala Lumpur-Malaysia. This study concluded that previous study periods, gender, and education specialization had an important role in this identification that became a reference for the improvement of Arabic Morphology learning curriculum. Students who were first learning Arabic in IIUMC had a high success rate only in matching letters (Anita) with pronouns and fi'il al-madi Shahih, and Mahmuz, and pronouns fi'il al-mahi al-Mithal. As for those who have studied Arabic for 5 years, 6 years, and 7 years have a high level of ability also in matching letters (Anita) with the pronouns and fi'il al-madi al-ajwaf. The level of ability of male students was lower than female students in all aspects without exception in matching letters (Anita) with pronouns and verbs that begin with the letter Ta’. As for students specializing in Arabic, Sharia, and Humanities, Reveal Knowledge and the Qur'an, and Arabic had different levels of success in accordance with their specialization, such as students with Arabic specialization had a high level of success in all the discussions that had been mentioned, however, for students with other specialties not. From the findings, there are several suggestions, namely communicative approach, gradualism, adoption of the most frequent morphological positions, introduction of grammar through meaning, reconciliation of teaching methods, designing Morphology materials, and exchanging cognitive programs for teachers and students.