A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF AFEMAI AND ENGLISH MORPHOLOGICAL STRUCTURES WITH LEARNING AND TEACHING IMPLICATIONS

ABSTRACT

The study aimedat Contrasting Afemai and English Morphological Structures with Learning and Teaching Implications.Morphology is the study of words,how they are formed, and their relationship to other words in the same language.It analyzes the structure of words,inflection, stems, root words, and affixation. This work contrast English and Afemai morphology to determine the points where they differ. It also examined the areas of similarities and discussed where they differ using a contrastive analysis model. These differences werepredicted as major causes of difficulties in the learning of the second language. Taxonomic model of CA was used to critically examine the two languages structures, and comment on the implication for teaching and learningthe second language. Corpus for the research was mainly Swadesh (2016) world list and first- hand information of Afemai speakers of the language studied. Afemai was found to posses morphological properties that relate to the English morphological structures. The research studied and contrasted affixation structures found in both languages. To this end, the similarities and differences that exist between Afemai and English in preffixation, suffixation, inflection and derivational morphemes were examined. The data of both English and Afemai used in this work were collected through oral interview and direct observation of the dialect of Afemai. Through the application of James (1983) in Al-khresheh (2016) theory of contrastive analysis, the investigation reveals that both languages have certain similarities and differences in word formation processes.