英语单词教学中的词形意识

In the English language, there are too many words for us to learn, even affixes alone cannot fully be dealt with by teachers and students in class, though some try their best to do so. Faced with numerous words and their variants, teachers and students have adopted various methods to cope with daily word teaching and learning. Quite often, teachers and students (at least in China) begin with great ambition, strong enthusiasm, but end up with unexpected disappointment and frustration. In this paper, morphological consciousness is initiated, stated, and how to develop and promote students’ consciousness in our daily English word teaching and learning is also briefly illustrated from the perspective of psycholinguistics. The author argues that direct and enriched English word teaching is essential, but students’ morphological consciousness is significant in constructive and heuristic teaching of English words, especially for those Chinese teachers and students who are struggling with English words. Morphological consciousness will help students readily gain necessary morphological knowledge, developing an intrinsic awareness of, and an everlasting interest in English words, so that they will more actively, confidently undertake the responsibility for learning and using English words with joy. Such practices can bring both teachers and students benefits such as accumulating as many clusters of English words as expected, or even more than expected.