To what extent can explicit morphology instruction promote vocabulary development for older adolescent or adult learners of English as a foreign language?

Abstract: Vocabulary development is important when it comes to learning a language, but it is also a challenging task. The Swedish syllabus focuses on implicit knowledge, and explicit teaching has been shown to have a positive impact on learners’ implicit knowledge. Therefore, this research synthesis explores to what extent explicit morphological teaching can be beneficial and improve vocabulary development for older adolescent and adult learners of English as a foreign language. It also explores how these findings are related to the English syllabus for upper secondary education in Sweden. The methods include searching several electronic databases with specific related search terms and using inclusion and exclusion criteria to obtain relevant articles. The research synthesis compiles the findings of a total of eight articles on both the effect of receptive vocabulary and productive vocabulary. The results indicate that explicit morphology instruction has a positive outcome for learners of English as a foreign language in both receptive and productive vocabulary, and, that it may be a useful teaching method. Finally, the results correlate with previous research and with the Swedish steering documents and the communicative classroom in the Swedish context. For further research, it would be of interest to see if the results are applicable in a Swedish context, and thus, further studies in a Swedish context are encouraged.