Derivational morphology and Serbian EFL learners: Three perspectives on the acquisition process

Although it has long been an under-researched topic in the field of applied linguistics, morphological knowledge is nowadays regarded as a key component of vocabulary acquisition. The past two decades have witnessed a proliferation of studies of both L1 and L2 learning contexts which shed light on various issues, ranging from morphological processing to receptive/productive knowledge of derivational and inflectional morphology. However, investigations into the acquisition of English morphology by Serbian EFL learners have, to our knowledge, been scarce. The purpose of this paper is, therefore, to explore the productive derivational knowledge of upper-intermediate Serbian EFL learners by means of three different instruments: a test focusing on the knowledge of the four main word family members (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs), a test of cognate and non-cognate derivatives employing six cognate English-Serbian suffixes (-ous/-oz(a)n, -ize/-izovati, -ation/-acija -ism/-iz(a)m, -ist/-ist(a), -ity/-itet) and a contextualized word-formation skill test. A combination of a qualitative and quantitative approach to data analysis has revealed the difficulties Serbian EFL learners have been experiencing in their morphology/vocabulary classes and it has enabled us to identify common mistakes and weak spots. Our results have pedagogical implications and could be put to use in curriculum design and methodology