英文摘要 |
Previous studies revealed that the morphological structure of vocabulary would benefit EFL/ESL learners the lexical and semantic information for understanding the meaning of complex words and clues for memorizing the word structure. However, Taiwanese EFL learners tend to use the Chinese word definition rather than the morphological structure in their EFL vocabulary learning. This study investigated the effects of two types of gloss: L1 (Chinese) word definition and L2 (English) morphological structure, on EFL vocabulary learning. 245 Taiwanese EFL university students were first assessed for their level of morphological structures and randomly assigned to two conditions. The participants were required to read the assigned glosses and finish the immediate and delayed vocabulary posttests. Our study reported that (1) learner’s awareness level of L2 morphological structure would affect the EFL vocabulary learning, (2) the group of L2 morphological structure glosses outperformed that of L1 word definition glosses on the delayed vocabulary posttest, and (3) L2 morphological structures are more beneficial than L1 word definitions for the EFL vocabulary retention. This study presented the empirical evidence of benefits of L2 morphological structure on EFL vocabulary learning. We also propose that the teachers might consider delivering the content of L2 morphological structure besides the L1 word definition in the vocabulary instruction, and we hope to provide a considerable perspective of the design of glosses for the future EFL vocabulary intervention. |