The Effects Of Phonological, Morphological And Orthographic Awareness On Reading Comprehension

The aim of the study is to investigate the relationships between phonological, morphological and orthographic awarenesses and English reading comprehension among Chinese junior school students from the developmental perspective. To be specific, three research questions are to be answered:(1) What developmental changes do the three types of metalinguistic awareness show? (2) How do the three types of metalinguistic awareness correlate with reading comprehension? (3) What contribution do the three distinctive variables make to reading comprehension?Participants of the current study were 198 students of Grade One and Grade Three from a junior high school in Jinan, Shandong Province. Instruments employed to measure students’ metalinguistic awareness included a phonological test, three morphological tests assessing their compound morphological awareness, derivational morphological awareness and inflectional morphological awareness, and an orthographic awareness test. Besides, PPVT (Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test) was used to evaluate students’receptive vocabulary, and a reading test to measure their performance on English reading comprehension. MA Tests, OA Test, PPVT and reading test were administered to students collectively while PA test was conducted in the form of oral test individually.SPSS 19.0 was adopted for data analysis. Independent samples t-test, correlation analysis and regression analysis were conducted. Results show that except for OA, developmental changes exist in all the other metalinguistic variables. Only MA is significantly correlated with reading comprehension for both grade cohorts. Besides, there exists continuous correlation between PA and OA from Grade One to Grade Three. MA contributes most to the variance of reading comprehension in the two grade cohorts, followed by PA. Moreover, among the three types of metalinguistic awareness, MA is the only variable that can be viewed as a predictor of English reading comprehension for Chinese junior high school students.The present study bears both theoretical and practical significance. Theoretically, this study is beneficial for us to gain a better understanding of how PA, MA and OA relate to English reading comprehension among Chinese junior high school students. Practically, since the three types of metalinguistic awareness are inter-correlated with each other either continuously or discontinuously, training on how to coordinate different cognitive processes might help to improve students’ reading comprehension. Meanwhile, great importance should be attached to MA in teaching, especially derivational MA.