A Study On Chinese Children’s Morphological Awareness,Vocabulary Knowledge And Working Memory Predicting Their English Reading Comprehension

In recent decades,the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension has been the focus of linguistic research.Many studies have shown that morphological awareness is the main factor that directly or indirectly affects or predicts reading comprehension.Theoretically,morphological awareness is regarded as an extension of the lexical quality hypothesis,so that it is taken as a significant contributor of comprehending reading tasks.In addition to morphological awareness,the effects of vocabulary knowledge and working memory on reading comprehension could be supported by the lexical quality hypothesis and the theory of working memory from a theoretical perspective,so that the present study is going to cover the relationship among morphological awareness,vocabulary knowledge,working memory and reading comprehension.Most empirical studies only shed light on the impacts of morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge on reading comprehension,and few studies have discussed the impact of working memory on reading comprehension empirically.As for the selection of participants,most previous studies have taken native English speakers as participants,and found that morphological awareness can affect or predict English reading comprehension performance directly or indirectly through vocabulary knowledge.However,few studies took Chinese children learning English as their participants and explored whether the afore direct or indirect effects still exist.Based on afore mentioned,this study will explore how morphological awareness,vocabulary knowledge and working memory influence or predict English reading comprehension among Chinese children.Specifically,the study focuses on the following questions:1)Does Chinese children’s morphological awareness affect English reading comprehension directly or indirectly through vocabulary knowledge,or do both direct and indirect effects exist?2)Does Chinese children’s morphological awareness have a significant effect on later English reading comprehension directly or indirectly via vocabulary knowledge and working memory,or do both direct and indirect effects exist?To answer these two questions,the current study took 149 pupils of upper grades in Pudong,Shanghai,as the participants.The instruments involved in this study included English morphological awareness tasks(including tests on inflectional morphological awareness,derivational morphological awareness,and awareness of morphological discrimination),vocabulary knowledge tasks,working memory test and English reading comprehension tasks.The questionnaire used in the current study included tests on morphological awareness,vocabulary knowledge and English reading comprehension at both Time 1 and Time 2.One-by-one oral tests on working memory were also given to these 149 pupils at Time 1.They were recruited and tested at two measurement points spaced half a year apart and were followed at the end of the second semester of the fourth grade and the end of the first semester of the fifth grade(with an interval of six months).SPSS 26.0 was used to perform descriptive analysis,correlation analysis and regression analysis,and AMOS 25.0 was applied for structural equation modeling.The results show that:1)Chinese children’s morphological awareness can affect English reading comprehension both directly or indirectly via vocabulary knowledge;2)Chinese children’s morphological awareness can only predict later English reading comprehension directly,rather than indirectly via vocabulary knowledge or working memory.This study clarifies the relationship among Chinese children’s morphological awareness,vocabulary knowledge,working memory and English reading comprehension,and provides some theoretical supports and teaching enlightenments for English teaching in primary schools of China.