Prefix Difficulty Order among Japanese University Learners of English

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  • 日本人大学生英語学習者の接頭辞の難易度順序

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The purpose of this study is to examine the consistency of the difficulty order for the 13 prefixes among Japanese learners of English (JLEs) reported by Mochizuki and Aizawa (2000) (henceforth M&A, 2000). They carried out an affix test with Japanese high school and university students as part of their research to investigate the relationship between JLEs' vocabulary size and their knowledge of affixes. The results showed that the best understood prefixes were re-, un- and pre-, while the least understood were ante-, in-, and counter-. To find out whether the orders of difficulty for the prefixes among JLEs obtained by M&A (2000) are common to other JLEs, the present study conducted an experiment with 135 university students who had attended English classes at two universities in Japan. The test method used by M&A (2000) was altered in three ways: a) Instead of using a set of three non-existing words for each prefix, such as antislimad, antikiofic and antirachy for the prefix anti-, the present study used a pair of real words like slavery and antislavery; b) the participants were asked to infer the meanings of prefixed words (e.g., antislavery) from the meanings of the base words (e.g., slavery) given in Japanese instead of answering the meaning of prefixes (e.g., anti-); and c) the number of multiple choice responses for each question was increased from four to five. The results showed that despite the differences in the test method, the rankings of M&A (2000) and the present study are highly correlated, with notable similarities in the rankings of re-, pre-, non- and ante-. This suggests that a fixed order of difficulty may exist among JLEs for the 13 prefixes. In addition, the present study proposed a tentative division of the prefixes into six groups according to their difficulties with the aim of improving teaching and learning in English language classrooms in Japan.

Journal

  • 教科開発学論集

    教科開発学論集 4 47-56, 2016-03-31

    愛知教育大学大学院・静岡大学大学院教育学研究科 共同教科開発学専攻

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