The relationship between morphological awareness and lexical inference ability for English language learning children with Korean first-language background

This study investigated the relationship between morphological awareness and lexical inference ability among Korean English language learning (ELL) children. In this context, morphological awareness is defined as a capability displayed by having general understanding of the segmental nature of words. Although the transfer of first-language metalinguistic awareness has been studied before, existing research on linguistically distant languages (i.e., Roman vs. non-Roman script) among upper elementary school children is very limited. This study presents a systematic attempt to examine the extent and nature of the relationship among first- and second-language metalinguistic awareness and lexical inference ability using third-, fourth-, and fifth-grade English-learning Korean children.;The sample consisted of 22 Korean students with less than two-year residency in the U.S. These students were recruited from five Korean churches in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The relational measure was used to elicit morphological awareness in Korean and English. The lexical inference test was used to measure the students' ability to infer unfamiliar English lexical items in sentence. An English Listening comprehension test was used to measure their second-language proficiency level.;Two kinds of analysis were conducted to explore the relationships between morphological awareness and L2 lexical inference ability. The quantitative results from correlational analysis support the strong relationship between first- and second-language morphological awareness and between second-language morphological awareness and lexical inference ability. The qualitative results from profile analysis provide specific ways in which first-language morphological awareness can influence second-language lexical inference ability.;Conclusions and instructional implications are drawn based on the study results, and limitations and future research areas are discussed.