The Relationship between Morphological Awareness and Vocabulary Knowledge of Thai EFL Students

This study focuses on the relationship between morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge of English among Thai EFL university students. All participants are taking English language as their major field in the universities situated at the lower northern region of Thailand. The morphological awareness identification test was employed to identify the linkage between morphological awareness and vocabulary gain Thai EFL learners. The test was divided into 2 parts: self-checking and morpheme identification. Fifty English vocabularies in intermediate and upper-intermediate level were used in the test in which the participants were requested to check whether they have seen the vocabularies in the test and also asked to break those vocabularies into morphemic units. The results showed that the participants possessed an adequate level of morphological awareness to break words into morphemes correctly even though they were unknown words of the participants. Additionally, the findings also revealed that there is no significant difference between male and female in acquiring morphological awareness of English and gaining English vocabularies