The Effect Of Morpheme Intervention On Word Recognition And Reading Comprehension Of Children With Reading Difficulties

Dyslexia is a concentrated expression of academic learning difficulties,mainly including deficits in word recognition and reading comprehension.Difficulty in word recognition refers to incorrectly identifying words,and presenting weak understanding of grapheme-phoneme correspondence,and it is impossible to establish an effective correspondence between the three,which causes reading difficulties and affects overall learning.The new curriculum standard indicates that word learning is an important part of primary school children’s learning.With the first two years of primary school being the crucial part of learning to identify words,it is important to cultivate children’s interest in literacy learning,which lays key foundation to development of reading and writing skills.In previous studies,it was common to solve the problem of word recognition by improving children’s cognitive processing ability or improving academic knowledge.Chinese characters logograms,with morpheme awareness being highly involved during word recognition and reading comprehension.Based on this conclusion,the current study first aims to explore the relationship among morphological awareness,lower-level word recognition and academic achievement.Then,a set of intervention materials in align with the development of compound awareness and children’s daily experience are adapted from available textbooks,in the hope of embedding effective cognitive and linguistic strategy into teaching practice.This study consists of the following three parts:Study I:The children of the lower grades of a primary school in Xi’an were tested in the "Chinese character mastery test for lower grade children",and some children randomly selected from the second grade were given the "Chinese morpheme awareness test for the lower grades of elementary school."Correlation analysis and regression analysis of morpheme awareness,word recognition and literary performance in lower primary school children was conducted.It aims to investigate the relationship among morphological awareness,word recognition and literacy achievement of lower-level primary students.Study II:According to the teaching requirements and objectives of the new curriculum standard words and the characteristics of Chinese characters,morpheme intervention materials that meet the characteristics of cognitive development and morphological awareness of children in lower grades was developed.The content of the material is selected from the literacy table of the Chinese textbook(2016).Intervention mainly includes the following steps:read aloud,morpheme discrimination,combination and deletion,making new words and sentences.Study III:Individual teaching was applied to 16 students with dyslexia,finding that it was most effective when query strategy and one-on-one instruction were combined with direct teaching.The following conclusions were obtained through research:Firstly,Morphological awareness contributes to word recognition,reading comprehension and literacy achievement.Awareness of morpheme,homophone,homograph,and radicals are correlated with word recognition and literacy achievement.Homophone awareness is a significant predictor of lower-level word recognition.Meanwhile,morpheme awareness and radical awareness uniquely predict reading comprehension and literacy achievement.The development of morpheme awareness is of great significance to language learning.Secondly,Intervention on morphological awareness was effective in improving word recognition and reading comprehension of students with dyslexia and was suggested to implemented based on the combination of various teaching strategies.