Morphological Intervention in Promoting Higher-Order Reading Abilities among College-Level Second Language Learners

Abstract

Reading success in a second language (L2) is vital to sustainable language and academic development because reading serves as a tool to absorb and learn new knowledge. Particularly in the context of college English as a foreign language (EFL), students constantly face the challenge to read English material to develop content knowledge. The current study investigated the effect of explicit morphological instruction on L2 students' higher-order inferencing and comprehension abilities. Sixty-two Chinese collegiate EFL students who were taking an intensive reading course (31 in the treatment class and 31 in the control class) participated in this study. The morphological intervention in the treatment class focused on identifying, decomposing, analyzing, associating, applying word parts in context. The control class received no explicit instruction in morphological awareness. After one semester of instruction, a series of morphology, inferencing and comprehension measures were administered to the participating students. The results showed that the didactic intervention of morphological awareness contributed to morphological knowledge and word-meaning inferencing ability, whereas there was no significant relationship between morphological intervention and text-based inference and comprehension abilities. The findings suggest that the intervention has a direct impact on word learning ability; however, higher-order processing skills may not directly benefit from it in a short period of time. Given that reading comprehension requires fine-tuned understandings of both local meanings and global contextual information, morphological awareness may not have an immediate effect on comprehension. Applied implications are also discussed in relation to effective morphological instruction and reading development in L2 contexts.

Effects of a Morpheme-based Spelling Intervention Challenging Previous Results

“…Morpheme-based instruction programs have recently attracted an increasing amount of attention among researchers and practitioners (Allen & Lembke, 2020;Apel et al, 2013;Gebauer, Fink, Filippini, et al, 2012;Goodwin & Ahn, 2013;Zhang & Zou, 2020). Explicit phonics-based instruction helps children to understand and apply the alphabetic principle of Indo-European orthographies (Ball & Blachman, 1988, 1991Bus & van Ijzendoorn, 1999;Ehri et al, 2001;Fischer & Pfost, 2015).…”

The Effects of Morphological Awareness on L2 Vocabulary Knowledge of Thai EFL Young Learners

“…Schmitt and Zimmerman (2002) demonstrated that learners might not automatically gain useful knowledge of derivative word forms by exposure, emphasizing the importance of paying explicit attention to derivative word forms. Likewise, Carlisle (2010) also found that "students do become more able to infer the meanings of unfamiliar words after receiving instruction in morphological analysis" (p. 466), and Zhang and Zou (2020) found that MA as a pedagogical intervention improved morphological knowledge and the ability to infer word meaning.…”

The Role of Morphological Awareness in Reading Comprehension in Chinese EFL Adult Learners

“…If it is really so important for reading comprehension, it will be possible to intervene in morphological awareness will improve reading comprehension. In the study by Zhang and Zou, they investigated the influence of explicit morphological instruction on reading comprehension [22]. They recruited English major students, which selected intensive reading classes in a Chinese university.…”