Contrasting Mada and English Morphology: Identifying Similarities and Differences with Implications for Pedagogy

Abstract

This paper on Mada and English Morphology identifies similarities and difficulties with pedagogy. The aim is to appraise the concepts of morphology, language variation, viz-a-viz agglutination, word-formative processes, affixation, change in stem, and change in base form, zero marking, compounding, derivation and acronym. The paper considers types of prefixes, infixes and prefixes (affixation). The juxtaposition of morphological rules in the two languages was also treated. Teaching English morphology to second language learners presented the pedagogical aspect of the paper. This paper suggests that English teachers should consistently adopt the audio-lingual method in teaching morphology. The use of morphological games would also greatly enable the teaching of morphology. The paper concluded that morphemes in English orthography may be realised through inflexion and derivation. In contrast, morphemes in Mada orthography may be realised through compounding, reduplication, and agglutination, part of speech, such as nouns, pronouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs and tone marks/diacritics.