Journal

Is a ‘a little doll’ truly a little doll? Morphology teaching through children’s stories (pp. 104-123), Marina Tzakosta, Chysavgi Dertzekou & Georgia Panteloglou

 

Is a ‘a little doll’ truly a little doll? Morphology teaching through children’s stories
Marina Tzakosta, Chysavgi Dertzekou & Georgia Panteloglou

 

The acquisition of word formation processes is considered to be the necessary prerequisite for the mastery of the morphology of the mother language as well as vocabulary development and vocabulary learning and teaching (Nagy et al., 2006; Nagy & Herman, 1987; Templeton, 1989). In addition, the acquisition of the morphological component of a language makes predictions regarding the acquisition of other linguistic components, such as the syntax and/or the semantics. The aim of this paper is to describe the main axes of a program of teaching the morphology of Greek through children’s stories and the results of its implementation in class. The core of the program is a story accompanied by consolidation exercises. Aki-aros-itsa, the teaching program, was implemented to a) a group of 94 monolingual preschool children (age range: 5-6 years) who served as the experimental group and b) a group of 54 adults (age range 18-50 years) who served as the control group. The results of the implementation of the program underlined the fact that the experimental and control groups’ scores improved with respect to the assimilation of derivational rules and principles after the teaching intervention. This entails that focused children’s stories provide an effective and fast way of teaching the morphology of Greek L1.

 

Key words: word formation processes, derivation, diminutization, augmentation, children’s stories, language teaching material