English morpheme acquisition order of Malay secondary school students

The objective of the study was to investigate the order of English morpheme acquisition (EMAO) by 600 early adolescent Malay secondary students (MSS) aged 13 years (Form 1), 14 years (Form 2) and 16 years old (Form 4) who were learning English in two different settings: urban or English as second language (ESL) and rural or English as a foreign language (EFL). This was a cross-sectional study adopting a quantitative research method in gathering the data. Two method of written elicitation techniques (translation and compositions) were used to obtain responses from the subjects and two scoring methods (target-like-use and suppliance in obligatory context) were used to measure the morphemes supplied. The quantitative findings show that (1) the EMAO-MSS of different age groups in the same setting is similar, (2) the EMAO-MSS is similar to the order of English morpheme acquisition (EMAO) of Makino’s (1979) subjects (3) the EMAO-MSS in the urban setting is not similar to the EMAO-MSS in the rural setting, (4) the EMAO-MSS in the urban setting is similar to EMAO of Dulay and Burt’s (1974a) subjects, (5) the rural students of different age groups follow similar order of morpheme acquisition, (6) the order of morpheme acquisition of the urban students is significantly correlated to Dulay and Burt (1974a), Pearson correlation coefficient (rho) is at (.75, p