A Study Of The Relationship Between English Morphological Awareness And Reading Comprehension Among Junior High School Students

This study aims to explore the relationship between English morphological awareness (MA) and reading comprehension in the context of English as a foreign language for junior high school students in China.The subjects participated in this study were108students of the2nd grade in a junior high school in a rural area in Taian, Shandong Province. Three research questions were put forward:(1) Is there a significant correlation between MA and reading comprehension?(2) Are there any differences between good and poor readers in their performance on MA?(3) If a correlation exists, does MA make an independent contribution to reading comprehension, beyond the contributions of other factors? The instruments employed in this study were a set of tests, including a vocabulary size test, a phonological awareness (PA) test, three MA tests measuring inflectional, derivational and compound MAs, and a syntactic awareness (SA) test. Data were collected in groups except those of PA which were administered individually. Students’performance on reading comprehension was measured according to their scores of the reading part in their final examination.SPSS17.0was used to analyze the data, and the results showed that (1) there exist significant correlations between the three types of MA and reading comprehension, and the correlation of inflectional and derivational MA are much higher than that of the compound MA;(2) there are significant differences between the good and poor readers in the performance on inflectional and derivational tasks but not in the compound task;(3) MA can predict a certain variance of reading comprehension. When the contributions of other factors are controlled, MA still makes an independent contribution to reading comprehension. Among the three types of MA, only the derivational MA makes its independent contribution to reading comprehension.This study has great significance. Theoretically, it extends the findings of previous studies in western countries to Chinese context, and will fill in some gaps of MA study in China. Practically, this study provides junior high school teachers with some implications. As MA makes an independent contribution to reading comprehension, training of MA may help improve reading ability.