A Study On The Contribution Of English Morphological Awareness To Reading Ability Among English Major Students

Morphological awareness(MA) can be defined as the awareness of the morphemic structure of words and the ability to reflect on and manipulate that structure(Carlisle, 1995). Given that MA is a favorable factor to enhance the depth of word knowledge and to associate with more members of a word family, it occupies a critical role not only in vocabulary growth, but it is also of great importance to reading comprehension. Although numerous researchers have demonstrated that MA is a great contributor to children’s vocabulary development, studies about the relation between MA and reading ability are still at an exploring stage, especially studies concerning foreign language adult learners. So it is indispensable to pay more attention and get more research fruits in this area.The present study investigates the general situation of MA and its contribution to reading ability among English major students in a normal university. Specifically, the aim of this study is to answer the following three questions:(1) What is the general feature of MA in English major learners as measured by both receptive and productive MA tasks?(2) Is there a significant correlation between English MA and reading comprehension among the subjects?(3) If there is a correlation, does MA make a unique contribution to English reading ability beyond vocabulary size and listening comprehension?This research was conducted with junior students in a normal university. 120 English majors at the age of 20 to 22 during their academic year of 2014 to 2015 were selected from 6 classes. All the participants were assessed on a set of English batteries like MA task which was made up of Word Segmentation Task(WST) and Affix Elicitation Task(AET). The morphological tasks were pilot-tested with 12 students who were not involved in the actual test. Based on the permission of all the participants, the collected data was put into SPSS19.0. Different statistical methods such as descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation analysis and regression analysis were used to explore the research questions.The major findings of this study are:(1) English majors have a moderate level knowledge of English MA as a whole, with receptive MA better than productive MA and inflectional MA better than derivational MA in both dimensions.(2) There is a significant correlation between MA and reading ability. The correlation is particularlysignificant between receptive inflectional MA, productive derivational MA and reading ability. But no significant correlation is found between receptive MA, in specific, receptive derivational MA and reading ability.(3) MA makes significant contribution to reading ability and can explain some of the variance in reading comprehension. After controlling the related predictor variables, MA still makes independent contribution to reading, so do receptive inflectional MA and Productive derivational MA.Based on the above results, implications are drawn and discussed at the end of this study. It may not only enrich the empirical studies in such a language context but also shed some light on current teaching and learning about English MA and reading among English majors in normal universities. Besides, the limitations are also mentioned for future research direction.