Within- And Cross-language Effect Of Morphological Training On English Reading Ability In Chinese Primary School

In recent years,a growing number of L2 reading studies have suggested that L2 morphological awareness(MA)plays a crucial role in L2 word reading among bilingual children.In addition,cross-linguistic transfer from L1 morphological awareness(MA)to L2 word reading has been proven in a great deal of research where L1 and L2 are both alphabetic languages,like Spanish and English.However,little is known about the relationship between Chinese MA which belongs to non-alphabetic language,quite different from English MA,and English reading ability.What's more,based on L2 reading studies which mainly focus on English word reading among children in kindergarten or grade one to three,few studies have paid attention to sentence or passage reading comprehension and upper graders who have a more complicated language learning background in primary school.Present study aims to investigate three questions among students in grade four in Chinese primary school: First,what's the relationship between English MA and L2 English reading? Second,what's the relationship of Chinese MA with L2 English reading? Third,at the stage of grade four,which MA,English or Chinese,is more influential to Chinese Children's L2 reading ability? In order to explore these three research questions,by means of MA test and reading test,60 fourth-graders in Chinese primary school are selected to join in a training program.They are divided into three groups,experimental group 1(G1)who are exposed to Chinese MA,experimental group 2(G2)who receive English MA and control group 3(G3)who receive no training.Finally,Chinese MA,English MA and reading ability of 60 students are tested again and all the data are collected and analyzed through SPSS 16.0.As a result,for research question one,English MA has great impact on English reading ability,not only at word level but also at sentence and passage level.In contrast,as for question two to examine the relationship between Chinese MA and English reading ability,it turns out that Chinese MA can be positively transferred to English reading ability only at word level,since Chinese MA training improves the sores of word reading rather than the scores of sentence and passage reading in G1.For the last question,comparing word,sentence,and passage reading of G1 to those of G2,they have almost achieved the same improvement in word reading.However,from the aspect of sentence and passage reading,G2 have gained more obvious progress than G1.It is probably because sentence and passage reading involves much more complicated cognitive process and English MA serves as much more direct predicator of English reading ability than Chinese MA.Overall,through systematic MA training,all the students' morphological awareness including Chinese and English MA has improved.Besides,present study reveals that there is a positive correlation between English and Chinese MA and English reading ability,especially word reading.