Metamorphological awareness and EFL students' memory, retention, and retrieval of English adjectival lexicons

Research has shown that foreign or second language learners' metalinguistic awareness has important effects on their acquisition of the target language. Important among a multitude of the concerns are problems these learners encounter when they have to process the morphological features of individual words, particularly in the acquisition of literacy skills. Nevertheless, for students who learn English as a foreign or second language for academic purposes, one of the biggest challenges in their advanced study is how they can effectively remember, retain, and retrieve the colossal number of newly learnt English vocabulary, including adjectival lexicons, to enhance their academic success. Results from the present report on the effects of metamorphological awareness of 65 adult Chinese EFL learners' memory, retention, and retrieval of adjectival lexicons show that, although the subjects in the two groups did not differ significantly in their performance on a pretest designed to check their lexical knowledge and no sex difference was observed, statistically significant differences were found between the two groups in both conditions (immediate and delayed retrievals) on a posttest. The experimental group and women predominantly performed better in the memory-retention-retrieval tasks assigned to them. Implications for educational research and practices are also discussed.