The Influence Of Morphological Awareness On Reading Ability Of Chinese Children In Primary School

Reading is a complex cognitive activity in which children obtain information from written discourse.Generally,children’s reading involves in recognizing and manipulating morphemes,organizing sentences and understanding the meaning of article.In this process,the decomposition of morphemes plays a fundamental role and morphological awareness corresponds to different aspects of morphological processing skills.However,few studies focused on different morphological awareness and their measurement of children’s reading abilities was not enough.In addition,exploring the contributions of factors to children’s reading is of great significance for the development of later language skills.Therefore,this study intends to combine the advantages of cross-section and tracking design to test children’s language skills in order to more clearly explore the relationship between the morphological awareness and reading abilities(reading accuracy,reading fluency and reading comprehension).A cross-section design was adopted to examine the relationship between morphological awareness and reading abilities(reading accuracy,reading fluency and reading comprehension)in study 1.Regression analysis showed that after controlling for age,four morphological awareness had unique contributions to reading accuracy,reading fluency and reading comprehension except for phonetic awareness,indicating that radical awareness,homomorphic awareness,homophonic awareness and compound awareness were important predictors to children’s reading abilities.A longitudinal design was adopted to investigate that the predictive power of morphological awareness to reading abilities(reading accuracy,reading fluency and reading comprehension)one year later in study 2.The results showed that homomorphic awareness accounted for 18% variances of subsequent reading accuracy,compound awareness accounted for 6% variances of reading fluency one year later,homomorphic awareness and compound awareness both accounted for 6% variances of subsequent reading comprehension.In summary,this study concludes:(1)Morphological awareness was effective indicator for predicting children’s current and future reading abilities(reading accuracy,reading fluency and reading comprehension).(2)Morphological awareness had different predictive power to reading abilities.Specifically,homomorphic awareness was significant predictors of reading abilities at the same time and reading accuracy and reading comprehension one year later;compound awareness had the strongest contribution to subsequent reading fluency and reading comprehension.