Listening Comprehension: The Role of Morphological Knowledge

Morphological knowledge has been identified as a significant sub-skill in bilingual listening comprehension, and lexical researchers consider listening comprehension an essential means for language learning. The current research attempted to examine the crucial four derivative word classes (adverb, adjective, verb, and noun) to represent knowledge of morphology. The objective was to find out if morphological knowledge can predict students’ listening comprehension and investigate the correlation between the four derivative word classes and listening comprehension. The participants of the present study comprised 171 English as a foreign language (EFL) undergraduate university students. This study was quantitative in nature and a multiple regression analysis was administered. Two tests of English language proficiency were conducted: listening comprehension and morphological knowledge. The findings of the research showed that there were positive and significant correlations between all four major derivative word classes and listening comprehension. In addition, verb derivative form not only had the most significant, positive correlation with the dependent variable, (i.e., listening comprehension), but it was also the most statistically significant contributing predictor of listening comprehension.