A Study Of The Effect Of Morphological Awareness On English Reading Comprehension

Morpheme and morphological awareness have been the research hotspots in language acquisition in recent years.Morphological awareness refers to the ability to recognize and manipulate the structure of words.Researchers at home and abroad have found a positive relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension.With regard to morphological awareness and reading comprehension,existing researches have focused on whether it affects reading comprehension,but there are few studies on the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension.This study starts with the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension,and explores its direct and indirect relationship with reading comprehension.It is expected to provide evidence for morphological awareness researches.Also,according to the professional training requirements,the author selects pre-service English teachers as research subjects,aiming to provide inspirational suggestions for pre-service middle school English teacher education and future English teaching through this study.The present study uses quantitative method,aiming to clarify the relationship and give theoretical ideas for further personal development of middle school English teachers and may even give some pedagogical implications.The subjects of the experiment were 91 pre-service middle school English teachers from a normal university in Shanghai.They are arranged to do a few tests including morphological awareness tests which test learners’ derivational morphological awareness,vocabulary knowledge test which tests vocabulary breadth and depth,lexical inferencing tests which tests lexical inferencing ability and reading comprehension tests.The data are collected and then analyzed with SPSS 19.0 and SPSS Process 22.0.After hierarchical regressions and mediation analysis,the results show that 1)morphological awareness both contributes to reading comprehension directly and 2)indirectly through vocabulary breadth.Vocabulary depth,does not have much correlation with reading comprehension.The reason may be that for reading comprehension,vocabulary breadth helps students to guess the meaning of the article and improve understanding.Lexical inferencing,also,fails to correlate with morphological awareness.The results of the study show that morphological awareness contributes to reading comprehension directly and indirectly through vocabulary breadth.The results have important implications for pre-service English teachers since pre-service English teachers can improve their reading comprehension ability by cultivating their own morphological awareness and applying it to their future teaching practice.