Authors:
Eri Kurniawan
and
Mochamad Salim Maridi Nurdiansyah
Affiliation:
Universitas Pendidikan Indonesia, Indonesia
Keyword(s):
Morphological awareness, language awareness, language acquisition, inflectional morphemes, verbs.
Abstract:
The purpose of the study is to provide empirical description of morphological awareness of Indonesian children aged 5-6 in terms of the ability to identify inflectional morphemes on verbs, specifically on prefix me(N)-, be(R)-, di-, and ter-. This study employs quantitative descriptive approach. The data are collected from an instrument called prefix choice task which consists of 15 test items. The participants are 17 children of a kindergarten in Bandung which consist of nine female children and eight male children. The result shows that children are able to demonstrate morphological awareness skill, but, the awareness is somehow incomplete (53%). The aspect of the awareness can be seen from several aspects: sentence forms (active-passive), verbal forms (transitive-intransitive), type of morphemes, and specific morphemes types. The study also found that generally female children have better morphological awareness than male children. Unlike English which can be simply divided into d
erivational and inflectional awareness, the study also suggests that the complexity of morphological features of Bahasa Indonesia contributes to the extent of the awareness that is being measured and further investigations in relation with other language development aspects are recommended.
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