A Study On The Contribution Of English Morphological Awareness To Reading Comprehension Among Junior Middle School Students

Morphological awareness(MA)is one type of metalinguistic awareness,which refers to an individual’s ability to decode the morphemic structure of words and further analyze them(Kuo and Anderson,2006).It has an important influence on the development of vocabulary learning and literacy.In addition,it is also one of the important factors that can affect English reading ability.Many studies in foreign countries have confirmed the positive effect of MA on children’s English reading comprehension.Whereas,only a small number of Chinese scholars have verified the pertinence between them,particularly the pertinence between them among Chinese junior middle school students.Hence,in the light of the relevant studies,this study takes junior middle school students in Wuhan as subjects and tries to figure out the contribution of English MA to reading comprehension.106 junior middle school students took part in the tests required for the study by the end of 2017,including vocabulary,phonological,morphological and syntactic tests.The phonological test is performed verbally and individually.The data of reading test data comes from the reading comprehension section of the final English examination.This study tries to address three research questions:1.Would there exist prominent correlation between MA and reading comprehension?2.Would there exist any distinctions between good and poor readers in their ability of MA?3.Would MA make a unique contribution to reading comprehension,beyond the contribution of other variables?The researcher add the collected data into SPSS 19.0,and obtained the following results through correlation analysis,independent sample t-test,and regression analysis:1.There exists prominent correlation between reading comprehension and MA among junior middle school English learners.2.The reading competence of junior middle school students has little influence on their performance of compound MA task,whereas,students with different English reading ability have significantly different scores in inflectional and derivational tests.3.MA could account for a number of the variance in English reading comprehension.After excluding the influence of other variables,the independent contribution of MA to reading comprehension remains significant,so do derivational MA.This study investigates the correlation between MA and reading comprehension among junior middle school English students in Chinese context.It not only enriches the research of English MA in China,but also provides important enlightenment for junior middle school English teaching.The development and training of MA,especially derivational MA,can help students improve their English reading ability.