Productive word-formation (adjectives) in foreign language teaching: Linguistic analysis and pedagogical aspects

Examination Thesis from the year 2006 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,0, University of Marburg (Anglistik und Amerikanistik), language: English, abstract: The following paper consisting of three main parts, namely an analytical, a didactic and an empirical section, seeks an approach to second language learners¿ acquisition and comprehension of certain word-formation rules. The study is based on questionnaires filled in by students of the grammar school Martin-Luther-Schule Marburg who are taking English as their special subject. The thirteenth graders are all German native speakers who have been taught English since the fifth grade. If word-formation is integrated into school lessons ¿ at least to some extent ¿ as curriculum and pedagogical literature demand the students, being advanced learners should have some analytical knowledge about the features of common English affixes and be able to apply their skills to the three tasks they are given in the questionnaires. These tasks demand receptive and productive skills which will be illustrated in detail in the empirical part where the survey is evaluated. The pedagogical opinion in research literature towards teaching word-formation in school will be discussed in more detail so that a comparison between theory and practice can be drawn. A vital point at issue will be the character of teaching word-formation in school. As usual, opinions are divided here. It is a major aim of this paper to defend an approach which is still fairly unpopular, namely an approach that includes productive aspects into the teaching of word-formation in school. Most educationalists still prefer an exclusively receptive approach as the discussion in the pedagogical part will show. As far as the linguistic analysis is concerned, it will be looked at adjectival suffixation. The suffixes being investigated in detail are German L1 suffixes -ig, -isch, and -lich as well as English L2 suffixes -ed, -ic, -ish and -ly. The high productivity of these suffixes will be shown whereas the term productivity is to be defined beforehand. Each suffix will be carefully described with regard to semantic, syntactic, morphological and phonological aspects. Of course, it will be dealt with relevant aspects only. Questions such as whether an adjective can be used attributively, adverbially and predicatively are not taken into consideration because they do not play a role for the formation of words. Moreover, it is not talked about phonological constraints because none of the affixes treated here seems to be subject to phonological restrictions. Therefore, it is only talked about the phonological effects the suffixes have on their bases. On the basis of such a description a contrastive analysis can be established. As contrastive analysis has been severely criticized for its tendency towards over- and underprediction of mistakes for years (cf. Kühlwein 1984: 314) it will be highly interesting to see from the results of the students¿ questionnaires if the mistakes predicted by the contrastive analysis are really made by the learner or if perhaps unpredicted ones materialise. As I intend to become a school teacher for English and German the results of this study turn out to be not only very interesting but practically useful as well.