Cross-language Transfer Of Chinese Morphological Awareness In The Upper Grades Of Primary School

With rapid promotion of bi-linguistic education for primary school students,some cross-linguistic phenomena appear in children's reading and writing.Morphological awareness(MA),referring to one's understanding and reflection on word-formation,plays an important part in meta-linguistic awareness.Whether in mono-linguistic or bi-linguistic leaning,morphological awareness(MA)accounts for children's reading acquirement.The obviously different word-formation of English and Chinese results in unique classifications of MA in each language.This paper consists of two sub-study.The first one tried to investigate the cross-linguistic transfer of Chinese MA in high-level graders in primary school within two aspects.The first study focuses on morphological awareness itself,such as the correlation of two languages.The second study was around the accountability of Chinese MA in English comprehension,according the RT and scores data with the help of E-prime.Study One aimed to test 120 high-level primary school students' English comprehension and metalinguistic-related skills,including MA in English-Chinese and others.The results showed two MAs of English and Chinese represented highly related(r=0.73),and the correlation of Chinese compound word MA and its counterpart in English was up to r=0.77.English compound word morphological awareness has large capacity to account for English comprehension,mainly from compound word awareness.Chinese MA accounts for 4%reliability in English reading comprehension,respectively from Chinese homophone awareness(2%)and Chinese compound-word awareness(2%).The second study was an intervention with the help on E-prime software among 75 students from forth or fifth grade,dividing into experimental group and control group.Both groups were tested their English compound-word MA previously and the experiment performed a series of button-response of Chinese MA as learning process,at the same time,the control group experience picture-relaxation.The two groups end up with English MA test and the results showed the experimental group got higher scores with statistic meaning(F=11.35,p<0.01,?2=0.14)and main-effect of time,namely the previous RT(reaction time)was significant shorter than the later RT(F=134.67,p<0.01,?2=0.67).This paper attempted to investigate the accountability from different aspects of Chinese morphological awareness of up-class-men in primary schools in second language acquirement,following a experimental intervention with the aim to increasing English morphological awareness.