The Effect Of English Phonological Awareness And Morphological Awareness On Chinese ESL Children's English Word Reading And Spelling

Word reading and spelling are fundamental literacy abilities that children should acquire in early language acquisition.Previous studies about second language acquisition have demonstrated that metalinguistic strategies,including phonological awareness,morphological awareness and orthographic awareness,are closely associated with children' early literacy acquisition.The present study is to explore the relation between English phonological awareness,English morphological awareness,English word reading and word spelling among Chinese ESL learners.The research questions of the study are:1)Is Chinese children's EPA related to their English word reading and spelling ability?If so,which dimension of children's EPA has strongest predictive power toward word reading and spelling ability respectively?2)Does Chinese children's EMA has predictive effect to both English word reading and spelling?3)What is the interaction between EPA,EMA,word reading and spelling?The participants in the study were students from Zhangguan Central School in Fuyang City,Anhui Province.Instruments employed in this study including nonverbal intelligence test,EPA tasks,which consisted of included onset-rime task,syllable task and phoneme task,EMA task,English word reading tasks and English word spelling tasks.A series of descriptive analysis,correlation analysis and regression analysis were performed with the assistance of SPSS 19.0,and major findings are as follows:1)Both onset-rime awareness and phonemic awareness have significant correlation with English word reading as well as word spelling.Phonemic awareness was the unique significant predictor for English word reading and spelling;2)EMA had significant predictive power to English word reading and spelling;3)The predictive power of onset-rime awareness to English word reading was partially mediated by EMA and the predictive power of onset-rime awareness to English word spelling was completely mediated by EMA.These findings provide more evidence for the interrelation between EPA,EMA and literacy development enriches studies about phonological and morphological awareness and second language acquisition in Chinese context.Moreover,the current may provide pedagogical implications and shed some enlightenment on future studies.