Misuse of Inflectional Morpheme in English Language among Faculty of Arts' Students

The study was carried out in University of Kordofan, during 2019-2022 to detect the misuse of inflectional morphemes in English language such as overgeneralization of inflectional suffixes; “(s) for present tense, (ed) for past simple, (en) for past participle, (ing), for present progressive, (er), for comparative, (est) for superlative and (s) for plural marker and possessive besides the omission of (apostrophe) in possessive cases. The study aimed to identify the type of errors of inflectional morphemes made by English language students and the difficulties of applying the rules of these inflectional suffixes. It also aimed to illustrate to what extent this errors changing the meaning and classification of words. Descriptive analytical method was followed. Questionnaire and pre-post test were conducted as primary sources for collecting the data. The sample compromised 60 English language teachers which represent 32% from the study population of 200 in Sheikan locality secondary schools which is selected through Simple random sampling method and 54 students represent all students in 10^th semester were selectedby purposive sampling techniques in university of Kordofan, Faculty of Education for pre/post test. A Course entitled morphological process of inflectional morpheme was designed and taught for these students within 12 lectures in two months and 10days. Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS – V-16) was used to analyze the data where Chi-square test was used to analyze the questionnaire and T. Test for paired sample was used to analyze the pre/post testat 0.05 level of significance. The results revealed that, 95% of respondents stated that, students face difficulties in using the inflectional morphemes during communication (χ² = 48.600 with 0.00 significance). There were 96.7% of the respondents agreed that, adding inflectional suffixes to English language words can change the morphological structure of these words (χ² = 52.267, with 0.000 significance) and 96% of the respondents agreed that, misuse of inflectional morphemes affects the grammatical rules and lead to confusion and misunderstanding (χ² = 52.267 with 0.001 significance). There were 83% of the respondents agreed that, students face difficulties when adding (s) as plural marker, possessive and present tense(χ² = 97.300 with 0.00 significance). Regarding the pre-test, 35.6% of students passed in adding inflectional suffixes for noun plural by adding (s) and irregular case while 84.5% of them who passed in post-test where (T = 4.664, with 0.000 significance). There were 31.5% of students who passed in pretest of noun possessive, while 74.1% of them passed in post-test (T = 1.338, with 0.187 and no significance difference between the tests). There were 22.2% of the students who passed in pre-test in verb inflection of present tense while 79.6% of them passed in post test (T = 2.742, with 0.008 significance). There were 63% of students who passed in pretest of past participle inflection while 92.6% of them passed in post-test (T = 5.440, with 0.000 significance). There were 38.9% of students who passed in comparative and superlative inflection while 66.7% of them passed in post-test (T = 3.077, with 0.003 significance). It was concluded that, students misused the inflectional morphemes of English language in the morphological process of word’s structure representing in overgeneralization of suffixes and omission of apostrophe. It was found that, the intervention improved student’s performance in using inflectional morphemes in English language. It is recommended that, teachers give chance for students to practice applying the rules of derivational and inflectional morphemes. Student should keep study the morphological process for building English language words through breaking the words into its base and affixes.