Morphological Awareness and Lexical Inferences in French among a Group of Thai Students

Abstract

This study aims to examine the derivational morphological awareness of a group of 27 Thai students learning French, to assess their ability to infer the meaning of unfamiliar words, and to explore the strategies and reasoning processes involved in formulating lexical inferences. The research is based on a morphological awareness test and a lexical inference test. The data collected were analyzed by using descriptive statistics, complemented by a qualitative analysis of interviews conducted after the tests. The results reveal a moderate level of morphological awareness and lexical inference ability among the participants. However, they also show that students who achieved the highest scores on the inference test largely relied on morphological reasoning, relying on the identification of known morphemes and comparisons with similar affixation processes in English. These findings suggest that explicit instruction in morphology, based on students’ linguistic repertoire, could help strengthen learners’ lexical inference skills and, more broadly, improve their reading comprehension in comparable learning contexts.