Characteristics Of The Development Of The Primary School Middle And High School Children Of Chinese Morphological Awareness And Its Relationship With Reading Comprehension

Reading is a basic human learning and life skills, which is the base of students accessing to knowledge. Reading involves the joint processing of shape, sound and meaning of the word which has different rules, thus the factors affecting the reading ability in the text is different. The important role of phonological awareness in reading comprehension of alphabetic orthography, especially in English, was widely recognized by researchers. While Chinese as a writing system different from alphabetic orthography, the factors influencing Chinese reading ability is still controversial. Chinese is a semantically transparent language, so a growing number of researchers believe that morphological awareness should have a negligible impact in Chinese reading. This paper discusses development features of primary morphological awareness and the role of morphological awareness in Chinese reading by three researches:Research one examined the development of morphological awareness in Chinese primary school students by investigating different morphological awareness tasks. The results showed that identification awareness of primary school children in third grade has developed to a high level, homophone awareness, homograph awareness and explaining morphemes had a more sustainable development throughout the primary stage. Homophone awareness developed the fastest in fourth grade; homograph awareness had a sustainable development; explaining morphemes developed faster in high grade. The results suggested that the morphological awareness developed more rapidly in fourth and sixth grade, morphological awareness increased and developed with grade.Research two investigated phonological awareness and orthographic awareness, which are other two language variables affecting reading, besides morphological awareness. Research indicated that there were significant correlations between Chinese reading and morphological awareness, phonological awareness and orthographic awareness, regression analysis showed that the morphological awareness was a significant predictor of reading comprehension beyond phonological awareness and orthographic awareness. Morphological awareness of language variables was the only significant predictor of reading comprehension through four grades, the contribution of morphological awareness to reading comprehension was the largest in sixth grade. Research three discussed the differences in the development of morphological awareness of Chinese primary school students, through the comparison between reading difficulties children and normal children, to further clarify the language cognitive characteristics of reading difficulties. The results showed that morphological awareness of reading difficulties children were significantly lower than age-matched group, but equaled with the reading level match group. Reading difficulties children performed poorly mainly in the tests of homophone awareness, homograph awareness and explaining morphemes. The results suggested that defects in morphological awareness was the core characteristic of Chinese reading difficulties children, the reading pattern of reading difficulties children was more similar to the reading level match group, which suggested that Chinese reading difficulties may be caused by the slow development and the development of morphological awareness could be a factor to diagnose Chinese reading difficulties.