The Role Of Morphological Awareness In Incidental Vocabulary Learning During Reading Among Chinese English Majors

Incidental vocabulary learning through reading is a hot topic in the field of secondlanguage acquisition. The past two decades have witnessed numerous empirical studies,at home and abroad, focused on this topic, and the results show that incidentalvocabulary learning are influenced by such factors as background knowledge,vocabulary size, phonological awareness, contextual clues, exposure frequency, taskdemands, and input modification. However, though morphological awareness has beenfound to facilitate learners’ literacy development, scare studies have examined itsimpacts on incidental vocabulary learning. Besides, the majority of previous relevantstudies merely focus on incidental learning of word meaning through reading, ignoringother word knowledge dimensions like spelling and word class. Thus, based on theresults of previous studies, the thesis attempts to investigate the role of morphologicalawareness in Chinese English majors’ incidental vocabulary learning during reading.To be specific, the thesis is to explore the following three questions:1Do affix types influence the participants’ morphological awareness?2Can the participants incidentally gain some knowledge of spelling, word classand meaning of the target words during reading?3Does morphological awareness influence incidental vocabulary learning duringreading?An experiment, consisted of six tasks, is conducted. Sixty first-year Englishmajors participate in the experiment. Their morphological awareness is measured bytwo tasks: a receptive one and a productive one. After a reading task, the degree ofsuccess in incidental vocabulary learning is tested in terms of three word knowledgedimensions: spelling, words class, and meaning. Major findings of the study are asfollows:1) The participants’ morphological awareness is influenced by different affixtypes. Regarding the receptive task, the participants show strong awareness ofinflectional morphemes and derivational prefixes, but much weaker awareness ofderivational suffixes. Regarding the productive task, they only show strong awarenessof inflectional morphemes, but similarly weak awareness of both derivational prefixesand suffixes. Besides, the participants show much weaker productive awareness ofmorphemes than receptive awareness.2) The participants do gain knowledge of spelling, word class, and meaning of the target words through reading, but the amount of gains is different across three wordknowledge dimensions. Substantial gains occur in word class recognition test andspelling recognition test, the mean accuracy rate amounting to73.5%and59.4%respectively. The least gains occur in the meaning reference test, for only44.8%of thetarget words are recognized correctly in this test.3) The participants’ morphological awareness is significantly correlated with thedegree of success in incidental vocabulary learning test, indicating that morphologicalawareness facilitates vocabulary learning through reading. To be more specific,morphological awareness, especially productive morphological awareness, plays apositive role in incidental learning of spelling and word class, though it fails to showfacilitative effects on incidental learning of meaning through reading.The findings above provide some pedagogical implications. For one thing,learners can enlarge their vocabulary, in terms of meaning and other word knowledgedimensions like spelling and word class, through substantial amounts of reading. Foranother, instructions should be made to strengthen learners’ awareness of morphemeswhich will facilitate vocabulary learning through reading. Furthermore, specialattention should be paid to instruction of productive knowledge and skills which play amore significant role in incidental vocabulary learning，but are more difficult to dealwith.