A Study On The Contribution Of The English Morphological Awareness To Reading Comprehension Ability Among Senior High School Students

Morphological awareness is the ability to consciously perceive and manipulate the intrinsic morpheme structure of a word.It refers to the awareness of a word's intrinsic morpheme structure,which can reach the meaning of this word(McBride-Chang et al.,2005).A large body of studies abroad have found that morphological awareness not only plays an important role in improving the vocabulary development of English learners,but also has a positive impact on English learners' reading ability.Moreover,morphological awareness has been examined to make a contribution to the reading comprehension of English learners.However,most scholars have studied the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension among native English speakers at a young age.There are few domestic studies on the relationship between morphological awareness and the reading comprehension ability of Chinese-speaking English learners.Therefore,it is of great significance to study the influence of English morphological awareness on reading comprehension ability among the learners who study English as second language.The present study aims to explore the development of English morphological awareness in English learning in senior high school,and focuses on the relationship between English morphological awareness and English reading comprehension ability.The following issues are to be addressed:(1)The overall condition of high school students' morphological awareness and control variables.(2)The correlation between English morphological awareness and reading comprehension ability among the participants.(3)The contribution of morphological awareness to English reading comprehension beyond vocabulary size and listening comprehension.To pinpoint these three questions,this study tested 105 second grade students in a senior high school in the fall semester of the 2019-2020 school year.The experiment carried out written tests on the subjects' English morphological awareness,English vocabulary size,English reading comprehension and listening comprehension.Among them,the morphological awareness and vocabulary tests were conducted collectively,and the reading and listening comprehension test data were obtained from the reading and listening comprehension section of the English mid-term examination.Descriptive analysis,Pearson correlation analysis and regression analysis were conducted on the experimental data,with SPSS24.0 software used.The following conclusions are drawn:(1)High school students' English morphological awareness is at the middle level.As for the subtypes of morphological awareness,compound morphological awareness is stronger than derivational morphological awareness.(2)There is a significant correlation between morphological awareness and reading comprehension in high school students.And the association between derivational morphological awareness and reading comprehension is stronger than that of compound morphological awareness.(3)After excluding the influence of vocabulary size and listening comprehension,English morphological awareness and its sub-components,derivational morphological awareness and compound morphological awareness,still have independent contributions to reading comprehension.This study not only enriches the research on English morphological awareness,but also provides important enlightenment for the development of English morphological awareness of high school English learners and the teaching of reading comprehension,suggesting that teachers should pay attention to the cultivation of English morphological awareness in the process of English teaching,so as to promote the development of students' reading comprehension ability.