Vol. 4, Issue 11, Part A (2018)

Abstract
Learning of affixes is inevitable for the students of ESL as it expands the students’ word knowledge to attain the mastery and command of language, and also to be competent and proficient in English. But, sometimes the students get confused in realizing the affixes in a word. As a result, the students’ development of the word power and the knowledge of word analysis are hampered to big extent. It is noted that most of the first year students of Higher National Diploma in English (HNDE) at the Advanced Technological Institute (ATI) in Trincomalee, Sri Lanka, while studying their subject ‘Introduction to Morphology’, make the errors in the usage of affixes as they meet the difficulty in recognizing them in the words. Thus, this study focuses on an innovative approach which helps those students improve their knowledge of affixes. The participants of this study were 40 first year students of HNDE at the ATI in Trincomalee. Further, a student-friendly computational tool, known as ‘Affix Learner and Tester’ as an innovative method, was developed by using the computer language, Visual Basic 6, to facilitate the learning and testing of affixes. Then the participants’ existed and gathered knowledge in affixes were tested through a pre-test (i.e. a questionnaire with the printed material) and a post test (with the tool), respectively. The results after the analysis of both tests revealed that the post test as an innovative method showed a good result than the result of the pre-test as a traditional method. Finally, the study concludes that the students of HNDE could develop their knowledge of affixes, i.e. prefixes and suffixes, to great extent by the utilization of the innovative method.