Recent decades in Korea's English education witnessed a significant change in its teaching strategy. A considerable number of educators are embracing the 'lexical approach' and are putting more emphasis on teaching the 'chunks' or 'collocations.' Despite being a crucial part of educated English, however, negative prefixes have somehow evaded the attention of most teachers. In this thesis, we will take an extensive look at the nouns and adjectives negated with negative prefixes. Furthermore, we will discuss how the Latinate prefixes and Germanic prefixes behave differently from each other. In doing so, many important phonological, morphological, and semantic aspects of English negative prefixes will be examined. In the latter part of this research, we will find out how well Korean college students are aware of the nouns and adjectives negated with negative prefixes. The results show that Korean college students fare better with adjectives than with nouns. Also, Korean college students are more familiar with frequent words (ranked higher than 5,000) than with infrequent ones. A step-by-step training in the most common patterns including these negative prefixes will considerably expand the size of students' vocabulary in a relatively short period of time. |