UNIVERSIDAD AUTÓNOMA DE CHIRIQUÍ

COLLEGE OF HUMANITIES
SCHOOL OF ENGLISH
MASTER DEGREE ENGLISH PROGRAM

QUALITATIVE RESEARCH PAPER

USE OF BOUND MORPHEMES BY SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNERS IN A

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY OF CHIRIQUI

BY: KEVIN CASTILLO

4-755-1749

FERNANDO DE LEÓN

4-753-2404

FACILITATOR:

RUBEN CUBILLA

2018
 Introduction

Have you ever wondered how difficult can be writing English as second

language learners? Academic writing is one of the most difficult skills that Spanish

language learners face with when learning English because of the different sentence

structures that both languages have. One of the most common errors that second

language learners face with when learning English is using bound morphemes.

Bound grammatical morphemes including the inflectional morpheme –ed are

commonly used in the simple past tense for regular verbs and is one of the most

basic structures that are instructed to English second language learners.

Tense and aspect are apparently two major issues in language teaching. As

a result, they occupy a major part in almost every language teaching syllabus.

Spanish native speakers in Panama do not like to compose in Spanish nor in English

because of the complicated transition words and rules that they have to follow. This

paper aims at examining some difficulties that second language learners in Panama

might face in their attempt to master past tense use of –ed bound morphemes.
 1. Methodological Procedures

The subjects of this study were from the group of third year night session of the

English BA program on a private university in David, Chiriquí. These students are

five males or females from 21 to 24 years old. They have been taught from the same

instructors since they started in the BA program. Some of them look for extra help

outside the classroom while others just stay with the instructor’s lesson. We collected

data by asking the subjects to write an essay based on a past experience that they

had in their life in order to get verbs in past to study the bound morpheme inflections.

2. Procedures for analyzing the data

After having all five essays we will identify verbs in past tense (with or without the

morpheme _ed, and count how many times they were used correctly. We are going

to identify the most common errors and analyze the data qualitatively in order to get

an idea of how does the same instruction affects learning morphemes inflections in

past tense. We are going to code data by purple all verbs correctly written in past,

and hatched the ones who were written wrong.

Results will be shown both as percentage (75%) and as a fraction (15/20).

3. Results

RESULTS

Total of Correct Percentage

Subject
Occurrences Usages %

1 20 13 65%
2 15 13 87%
3 22 18 82%
4 25 14 56%
5 29 25 86%

4. Discussion of results

After performing this observation, it is notable to say that there were a

predictable percentage of errors made by the students when using simple

past tense. Simple past tense structure is commonly misunderstood by

student since they confuse or forget to use the correct morphemes and

suffixes when referring to anecdotes in the past. Another important fact about

this measurement is that students are not clearly aware of the verb regularity,

in other words, if the verb they are using is regular or irregular.

We can recommend teaching students the two kinds of verbs in order to make

them familiar with them, so that they will be conscious about the correct

morpheme to use when writing an account in the past.

Conclusion

Once we finished this observational task about the use of -ed for simple past

tense, we have concluded that the use of Bound morphemes is a confuse

topic for second language learners because it deals with regular verbs and

sometimes they apply this rule even with irregular verbs. Another fact that we,

as the researchers, realized the lack of attention that some students were

paying to the class when explaining critical aspects about this complicated

structure. Some of them were quite cooperative and participated actively

when the professor explained the topic of regular and irregular verbs in the

past tense. (Professor’s testimony)

Appendix