Effects Of English Morphological Awareness On The Reading Comprehension Of Senior High School Students

Reading comprehension is one of the essential skills of language learning,which draws on a vast array of linguistic knowledge.Morphological awareness,the conscious ability to understand and manipulate the smallest units of meaning to produce complex words,has been demonstrated to have direct or indirect positive effects on reading comprehension.Within the indirect effect pathways,vocabulary knowledge and lexical inference ability appear to perform mediating functions.Although a large volume of studies has been conducted to explore how morphological awareness affects English reading comprehension,there is no general agreement on this issue.Besides,most of the related research was focused on English native speakers with little attention to Chinese EFL learners.The current study aims to investigate the direct and indirect effects of English morphological awareness on reading comprehension among senior high school EFL learners.Specifically,the present study tries to answer the following two research questions:(1)Does senior high school EFL learners’ English morphological awareness have a direct effect on reading comprehension?(2)Does senior high school EFL learners’ English morphological awareness have indirect effects on reading comprehension through the mediation of vocabulary knowledge and/or lexical inference ability?All the 240 subjects engaged in the current research were senior high school students in Grade 2 from H province.A series of testing tasks were administered to examine subjects’morphological awareness,vocabulary knowledge,lexical inference ability,and reading comprehension.Among them,vocabulary knowledge tests included two aspects,vocabulary breadth and vocabulary depth.The reading comprehension ability was embodied by subjects’reading comprehension scores in their mid-term examination.Then,with the aid of SPSS 22.0,the descriptive analysis concerning all variables,including morphological awareness,vocabulary knowledge,lexical inference ability and reading comprehension,was conducted.Besides,the correlation analysis between them was also conducted.With the employment of AMOS 22.0,the direct and indirect impacts of MA on reading comprehension were tested within the Structural Equation Modeling.Based on the detailed analysis,the major findings of the current research are summarized as follows:Firstly,it is found that senior high school EFL learners’ English morphological awareness makes no significant direct effect on reading comprehension.Secondly,the findings manifest that senior high school EFL learners’ English morphological awareness has significant indirect effects on their reading comprehension through two distinct paths.In the first indirect route,morphological awareness contributes to vocabulary knowledge,which then facilitates reading comprehension.In the second indirect route,morphological awareness contributes to lexical inference ability,which then influences vocabulary knowledge,and finally,reading comprehension.The above findings revealed by the current study,for one thing,offer some support for future empirical and theoretical studies on the associations between morphological awareness and reading comprehension,and even studies in relation to vocabulary and lexical inference.For another thing,they yield some implications and suggestions for language learning and education.It indicates that English teachers are expected to attach more attention to morphological knowledge and incorporate it into daily English instruction.By doing so,it is plausible to advance learners’ vocabulary acquisition and reading comprehension.