Mal-Production Of Inflectional Morphemes: Causes And Remedial Actions

Abstract

Abstract English

The present study investigates the inflectional morphemes in English

Language, with regards to the allomorphs of the plural morpheme for

English nouns and the allomorphs of the past tense morpheme for English

verbs. The aim of the study is to outline and illustrate the problematic

areas, which include spelling and pronunciation mistakes when using these

allomorphs. Towards this end, the study explains how Sudanese EFL

learners make mistakes when forming these allomorphs. From these facts

problems discovered and remedial actions are suggested.

To tackle the problem of this research, the researcher has adopted the

analytical and error analysis approaches.

The research is organized in five chapters. Chapter one introduces the study

and outlines the plan of the research. Chapter two provides a theoretical

background for the field of linguistics in general. Nevertheless, the center

of attention in this chapter is to study the sphere of morphology.

Furthermore the focus will be Inflectional morphemes and their different

types. The chapter is concluded with a review for some of the previous

studies. Chapter three concerns the methodology adopted in this research.

Data is obtained from respondents through a test.

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This data was then analyzed, in chapter four, using statistics terms and

descriptive interpretations. The analysis and discussion of results includes

the recognition of weaknesses and the underlying causes. Moreover, the

discussion is extended to include the examination of common mistakes. The

findings of this study reflected some of the problems that encounter

Sudanese EFL when dealing with the spelling and pronunciation of English

inflectional morphemes. Findings also illustrated that errors are related to

how and what have been taught, that is, teaching technique and process has

not been adequate. The findings also showed that irregular nouns and verbs

are the difficult ones for EFL learners; because they don’t conform to any

given rule, in addition to that, students did not have enough practice.

Finally chapter five provides some recommendations one of them is that

Sudanese EFL learners are to be more exposed to the Target Language(TL)

so as to reduce the Mother Language (ML) interference in learning and

teaching processes. Another suggestion is to modify and intensify the course

of morphology in this syllabus. This research is concluded with some

suggestions for further researches.

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