The Effects Of Morphological Instruction On Vocabulary Learning And Reading Comprehension Of Chinese EFL Learners

Morphological instruction has been proved to be effective on the improvement of English Learners’ L2 language abilities,including vocabulary and reading comprehension.Previous studies have explored effective morphological instructions among the speakers of alphabetic languages.However,Chinese EFL(English as a Foreign Language)learners,whose mother tongue is a non-alphabetic language,have been neglected.Among the Chinese EFL learners,the college students are in a difficult situation in learning English as they are facing with the big challenges of college curriculum and college tests on one hand and lacking effective learning methods and instructions on the other hand.This study introduced the widely adopted morphological instruction method of teaching roots and affixes to investigate its effects on Chinese college EFL learners’ vocabulary learning and reading comprehension.In addition,we also examined the different effects of different focuses of the instruction.In this study,subjects were divided into three classes:the "Roots Class",the "Affixes Class" and the "Control Class".The "Roots Class"received "roots-focused" instruction while the "Affixes Class" was given"afixes-focused" instruction.The "Control Class" was only taught by conventional instruction.The results showed that the morphological instruction of roots and affixes teaching was effective in improving Chinese college EFL learners’ morphological awareness,vocabulary and reading comprehension,as the experimental group significantly outperformed the control group on these measures.With Mixed Linear Models we found that after controlling the effects of variables such as age,gender,proficiency in English,initial vocabulary and random effects,morphological instruction still had a significant contribution to the growth of vocabulary.Similarly,after accounting for the initial English proficiency and reading comprehension,morphological instruction still had a strong and positive effect on reading comprehension.As to those two different instruction methods,the outcomes were only significantly different in a judgmental task called Morphological Judgment.The“Affixes Class" outscored the "Roots Class" in this test.We hypothesized that because Chinese language has a vast number characters contain the semantic articles that were quite similar to the roots in English,but seldom contain any counterpart to English affixes,so the affixes are easier to attract Chinese English learners’ attention with their uniqueness.With stepwise regression analyses,we also found that morphological instruction did not improve reading comprehension directly but indirectly through the improvement of vocabulary size.