A Study On The Correlations Between English Morphological Awareness,syntactic Awareness And Reading Ability Among Senior High School Students

Improving students’ reading ability is one of the core qualities of English subject.However,students’ reading ability is lower than we expected,and they often encounter barricades in the reading process.In abroad,researches on the relationship between morphological awareness and reading ability,syntactic awareness and reading ability are abundant.And the research findings provide theoretical evidence for English teaching.But the results are disputable.What’s more,relevant researches mostly take children and primary school students in English-speaking countries as subjects.Chinese students are not fully covered,mostly including children,junior students and college students.Therefore,whether it is widely used among Chinese students is uncertain.Based on that,this paper aims to explore the influence exerted by morphological awareness and syntactic awareness on English reading ability and the correlations between these two awareness and reading ability.In this study,the author aims to address three questions:1.Are there significant correlations between MA and reading ability,SA and reading ability? 2.Are there significant distinctions between good and poor readers in their MA and SA? 3.Does MA or SA make a unique contribution to reading comprehension? If so,how about the contribution?Adopting questionnaire approach,this study takes 221 senior high school students from 4 classes in Huaibei Suixi Middle school as subjects and tries to figure out the contributions of English MA and SA to reading comprehension.Research tools include English morphological test,syntactic test and reading comprehension test.Carrying out simultaneously among four classes,all these tests are completed within one week.The researcher adds the collected data into SPSS 19.0,and obtains the following results through correlation analysis,one-way ANOVA and regression analysis: 1.There exists correlations between MA and reading ability,between SA and reading ability among senior high school students.The correlation coefficients are 0.659 and0.450 respectively.There are moderate correlations between the two awareness and reading comprehension ability;2.Students at different reading levels exist prominent distinctions on MA and SA.3.MA makes a great contribution to reading comprehension.About SA,the attributive clause and noun make contributions to reading comprehension,but other dimensions have no contribution to reading comprehension.Taking senior high school students as subject,the research not only enriches the research in MA and SA,but also enriches and develops the reading comprehension theory.And the result provides theoretical basis for English teaching in reading comprehension.Besides,it makes teachers focus their attention on the cultivation of morphological awareness and syntactic awareness.