A Study On The Effects Of English Phonological Awareness And Morphological Awareness Training On EFL Junior High School Students’ English Word Reading

According to English Curriculum Standards for Compulsory Education(2022 Edition),junior high school students need certain phonological and morphological awareness to form the ability to read words.Studies have shown that phonological and morphological awareness play an important role in students’ reading of English words.However,studies on PA and MA were mainly conducted among native young learners,and only a few studies were conducted among non-English teenagers.In recent years,more and more scholars have begun to discuss the relationship between PA,MA,and word reading ability.However,the domestic research field is more limited to the influence of single phonological awareness or single morphological awareness on English word reading.Few studies combine PA and MA training in English word reading,and even fewer studies regard junior high school students as research subjects.Based on this,this paper investigates both the impact of phonological awareness and morphological awareness on junior high school students’ English word reading.There are three research questions in this study.(1)What effect do the PA and MA training programs have on the junior high school students’ phonological and morphological awareness?(2)What effect do the PA and MA training programs have on the junior high school students’ English word reading ability?(3)How are the students’ English PA,MA and word reading correlated with each other? The author used a quantitative approach to answer these questions and conducted a two months teaching experiment in Lanzhou No.9 Middle School.Sixty students of grade seven took part in this experiment.The three classes were randomly divided into the phonological awareness class(Class 1),the morphological awareness class(Class 2),and the combined training class(Class3).The test tools include an English phonological awareness test,an English morphological awareness test and an English word reading ability test.Before training,the three classes received a pretest and one-way analysis of variance on PA,MA,and word reading.The test’s findings demonstrated that there was no discernible difference among these three classes.Then the students of the phonological awareness class were given explicit PA training.The PA training was conducted at the syllable,rhyme,and phoneme levels.The students of the morphological awareness class were given MA training.The MA training aimed to promote an explicit understanding of morphological rules.The MA training focused on inflectional morphology and deviational morphology.Class 3received English lessons explicitly introducing both phonological and morphological awareness training.The training is carried out in four phases: The author concentrated on teaching some fundamental phonetic concepts,like the International Phonetic Alphabet(IPA)and letter sounds,during the first phase of the training.The second phase focused on letter combination sounds.The third phase introduced some phonics rules;after learning the knowledge of PA,the students were taught the knowledge of morphemes.After this treatment,the three classes were required to finish the PA,MA,and word reading ability posttests.The English PA test includes rhyme detection,onset detection,coda judgment,and onset judgment.The MA test is adopted from the Word Segmentation Task to measure the participants’ morphological awareness level.The English word reading test consists of reading real and pseudo English words.In this study,SPSS 24.0 statistical analysis software was used to conduct the Paired-Sample T-test,independent-sample t-test,one-way analysis of variance,and Pearson correlation analysis.It is found that phonological awareness and morphological awareness can be improved through training at the junior high school level and that PA and MA training benefits students’ word reading ability.Moreover,there is a significant correlation between English PA and English word reading performance.The correlation between English MA and English word reading is not significant.The English word reading ability of students in class 3 is significantly higher than that in class 1 and class2,which shows that the combined systematic PA and MA training is better than single PA training or single MA training.There are several theoretical and practical implications of this study.Firstly,results indicate that explicit PA and MA training can help students improve their PA,MA,and word reading ability.Secondly,this study shows a significant correlation between English phonological awareness and word reading ability.Finally,phonological awareness training incorporated with morphological awareness training can significantly improve students’ PA,MA,and word reading ability compared to either phonological awareness training or morphological awareness training alone.In conclusion,English teachers should realize the importance of phonological awareness training incorporated with morphological awareness training and adding activities to English classes.