Morphological Awareness and Word-Formation Morphemes as a Pedagogical Instrument for Vocabulary Semantization in Foreign Language Instruction

Résumé

Morphological awareness — the conscious understanding of word-formation processes and the semantic and syntactic properties of derivational morphemes — constitutes one of the most productive and transferable competencies available to foreign language learners for autonomous vocabulary development. This article examines the theoretical foundations and pedagogical applications of morpheme-based semantization: the method by which learners derive the meaning of unfamiliar derived words from the meaning of their constituent morphemes, thereby extending their productive and receptive vocabulary without reliance on direct instruction or dictionary consultation. Drawing on morphological awareness research, word-formation theory, vocabulary acquisition studies, and communicative language teaching, the study analyzes the structure of derivational processes in Russian and English, assesses the empirical evidence for morpheme-based vocabulary instruction, and proposes a framework for integrating word-formation analysis into communicatively oriented foreign language curricula. Special attention is paid to the development of word-formation dictionaries as pedagogical instruments that systematically codify the semantic and combinatorial properties of derivational affixes, enabling learners to construct and interpret derived words independently. The findings confirm that systematic morphological awareness instruction produces significant gains in vocabulary breadth, reading comprehension, and metalinguistic awareness, and that word-formation competence is a critically underexploited resource in foreign language vocabulary pedagogy. The article concludes with practical implications for curriculum design, lexicographic resource development, and teacher training in the context of foreign language instruction.