Translanguaging and inflectional morphology development in EFL context: middle school learners’ practices and teachers’ perceptions

Abstract

Abstract: This paper follows an exploratory design, based on a mixed methodology to pinpoint how the full linguistic knowledge of English as a foreign language (EFL) learners would influence their inflectional morphology development. By employing quantitative and qualitative modes of enquiry, learners’ practices and teachers’ perceptions are explored. An interview is delivered to six EFL middle school teachers to capture their perceptions of learners’ practices in the classroom integrating translanguaging practices. Samples of learners’ writings are gathered, and a corpus analysis is conducted to investigate their knowledge of English inflectional morphemes. Learners’ common inflectional morphology errors are also generated. The findings reveal that omission, addition, overgeneralization, mis-formation, and mis-ordering are the common inflectional error practices among learners. Moreover, omission of the morpheme ‘s’ of plurality and third person singular present verb form was the most common omission error among learners. Learners are more aware of the use of comparative and superlative inflectional morphemes, with no errors being committed. With regards to the findings of the interview, they indicated a minor discrepancy. That is, whereas two teachers express the view about the use of Arabic for the teaching of grammar than the teaching of vocabulary, the remaining four teachers believe that the use of Arabic for learning vocabulary is more beneficial. The teachers also claim that because the grammatical structures are not always easy to translate, and the grammar of Arabic is more complex than that of English, it is necessary to make learners aware of the detrimental effect of translanguaging in learning grammar. The smoothness of the acquisition of accurate grammatical categories in the target language is disrupted by learners' first language, which may lead to misleading knowledge, especially as each language has its own characteristics in building structures. Furthermore, most teachers report noticing the practice of translanguaging by their learners for a variety of reasons; no teacher deny its regular occurrence in their classrooms. Moreover, only two teachers are in favour of relying on a translanguaging-based instruction suggesting that it is a comprehensive resource for further classroom clarification, as English and Arabic do not always have the same features. Keywords : EFL, inflectional morphology, perceptions, translanguaging.