‫Major Morphological Difficulties of Using English Morphemes Facing Sudanese Secondary School Students

Abstract

The present study is aimed at investigating the issue of the major morphological difficulties of using English morphemes faced by Sudanese Secondary School Students. The main objectives of this research are to shed light and identify the morpheme difficulties and errors that are connected with the use of the definite and indefinite articles, the present simple tense, the irregular verbs and irregular plural. This is besides the difficulties that are related to the English compound nouns in their plural forms, the order of adjectives in a sentence, the suffix (er) when forming comparative forms and nouns and the morphemes (not) and (un) plus adjectives when forming negation and antonyms. The significance of this research stems from the fact that identifying and analyzing the grammatical difficulties and errors that are encountered by Secondary School Students will pave the way to overcome those difficulties and errors. Thus, improving the text books in the subsequent revisions and improving the standard of the students. The major question raised in this study is what are the types and potential sources of the grammatical difficulties and errors that Sudanese Secondary School Students make in the use of the English grammatical morphemes. The researcher has followed the descriptive analytical method to obtain the results. Two important tools were used for eliciting and analyzing data, Teachers' Questionnaire (TQ) and the Students' Diagnostic Test (SDT) for third grade secondary students. The results obtained led the researcher to suggest that teachers must get special training on how to make students learn grammar without being demotivated towards language. This is besides the efforts needed to accompany the syllabus taught with work books and tape-recordings. Add to that students who face those difficulties need to have some remedial lessons and drills. The findings achieved in this study encouraged the researcher forwards to present some suggestions for further studies.