Inflectional vs. Derivational Morphological Accuracy in Sudanese Undergraduates' EFL Writing: A Comparative Study of the Suffixes "- ing" and "- ion”
Abstract
This study investigates inflectional and derivational morphological accuracy in the academic writing of 30 Sudanese EFL undergraduates in the English Department, Faculty of Education – Hantoub, University of Gezira, Batch 43. A diagnostic writing test was used to examine students' use of the suffixes -ING and -ion. A total of 846 -ING attempts and 312 -ion attempts were identified. Descriptive statistics and a Wilcoxon signed-rank test indicated significantly higher accuracy for -ING (73.9%) than for -ion (46.8%; Z = 4.62, p < .001, r = .60). The suffix -ING occurred approximately 2.7 times as frequently as -ion (Wilcoxon signed-rank test on per-participant means: Z = 4.71, p < .001, r = .59). Error analysis identified 221 -ING errors and 166 -ion errors. The most frequent -ING error was omission of the suffix after the auxiliary be (ING-2), accounting for 89 errors (40.3%). The most frequent -ion errors were stem preservation (ION-1; 58 errors, 34.9%) and inappropriate allomorph selection (ION-2; 47 errors, 28.3%). A subgroup of 12 participants (40%) demonstrated high accuracy with -ING (M = 81.2%, SD = 6.7) but substantially lower accuracy with -ion (M = 38.5%, SD = 9.1), a pattern consistent with, rather than conclusive evidence for, dual-mechanism accounts of morphological processing. Pedagogically, the findings support explicit instruction in English nominalization, morphological families, and common -ion allomorphs. The study proposes a four-session intervention module and offers a diagnostic error taxonomy for EFL instructors in comparable Arabic-speaking contexts.
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