2. Literature Review

2.1 Memorization of root and affix 

Memorization of root and affix refers to a kind of method that combines the meaning of the root and the affix with that of the vocabulary itself and thus relating it to an available way to memorize. The so called root is the fundamental part of the word, in other words, it represents the basic meaning of a word or its main content. The meaning of a word is generated by its root, which plays a key role in forming a word. The meaning of the root together with the affix (prefix and suffix) consists of the meaning of a word.  Not only is a root a core part of one word, it is also a key part of a group of the similar words, where we can recognize its common part through morphology. The common part stands for the common meaning of a group of words. One root can generate a quantity of words, adding the suffix which changes its word class and the prefix which changes its meaning, more words will be produced. It is apparent that the meaning of the root and affix has much to do with its corresponding word. As for this, it is easy for us to guess the meaning of many words with just a few roots and affixes. For example, the root ‘cede, ‘ceed’, ‘cess’ means ‘walk ’,and meanwhile the prefix ‘pro ’, ‘re ’ means ‘walk forward ’ and ‘walk backward ’,so the word proceed means ‘move ahead ,the word recede means move backward or recline ’ What’s more, the prefix ‘ex ’ means ‘out ’,so the word exceed means ‘go beyond ’,the prefix ‘ac ’ means ‘close to ’,so we can predict that the word access means ‘the right to do sth’.But it is a pity that not all roots can be used to memorize the words as explicit as the examples listed above .Sometimes we can’t know the meaning of the roots and affixes directly, they are likely to have hidden meanings. At this time, the rich imagination does work. It is a kind of recreation, which means that we should take advantage of the pision, homophone and the relation between words to memorize them. It is important that we should imagine the new root’s extended meaning and the word it makes up, when analyzing the prefix, suffix, or the root of a word, imagination is also needed. Imagination is an indispensable part for us to analyze, digest and memorize a word. It is unacceptable to know about the meaning of a word in a mechanical way that just follows the prefix, suffix and root without imagination, the reason is that rarely can we learn enough words mechanically, most words need us to think deeply, only by imagination can we thoroughly explore the subtle difference in the word formation.