Abstract
This study explores Vietnamese English-majored students’ ability to produce the English derivatives of given target headwords. In total, 118 English majors who enrolled in three writing courses completed a decontextualized derivative form-recall test which targeted 30 headwords of different word family frequency levels (1000-5000) as a class vocabulary test. The findings demonstrated that these students were able to produce slightly more than one-fourth of the possible derived forms and they were less successful with lower frequency words. There was great individual variation among students and verbs and nouns had higher accurate production rates than other parts of speech. In consideration of these findings, the study discusses pedagogical implications for instruction and research on English derivative knowledge.
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