ESL teachers, in addition to being aware of their students' processes of adjustment to this culture and their educational backgrounds, can benefit from a knowledge of their language background. Return to Top Language Background Having some knowledge of the structure of Vietnamese can provide insight into the problems that Vietnamese students face with English. Many refugees have learned English informally and may have relied heavily on the structure of their language in speculating about the patterns of English. Be sentences 4. In English, we use a variety of suffixes, both derivational and inflectional.
Derivational suffixes can change the meaning and sometimes the part of speech of the word stem.
By adding a derivational suffix, success becomes successful , amaze becomes amazement and active becomes activity . Inflectional suffixes, while not changing the basic part of speech of a word, carry grammatical meaning and change the form of the word. By adding an inflectional suffix, achieve becomes achieves , achieving or achieved , honor becomes honors , pure becomes purer and purest and Karl becomes Karl's . In Vietnamese, there are no suffixes. Several contrasts between the two languages concerning extensively used suffixes follow.