The Role of Awareness of Cross‐Language Suffix Correspondences in Second‐Language Reading Comprehension

Abstract

A B S T R A C TUnderstanding text in a second language can be particularly challenging. The authors explored the contribution of morphological awareness in children's first and second languages to development in second-language reading comprehension. Critically, the authors examined the role of a skill that might be at the heart of these cross-linguistic connections: awareness of crosslanguage suffix correspondences. This is the awareness, for instance, that the French suffix -eux and the English suffix -ous have the same meaning in the two languages, despite the fact that they look and sound different. The authors tested the contributions of each of these morphological skills to French reading comprehension in a study of students with diverse first languages enrolled in a Canadian early French immersion program with instruction entirely in French. Seventy-five students were tested in grade 2 and again in grade 3. In grade 2, students completed measures of English and French morphological awareness and awareness of cross-language suffix correspondences, along with control measures of nonverbal ability, French vocabulary, and French phonological awareness. In grades 2 and 3, students completed measures of French reading comprehension. The authors found that both English and French morphological awareness were related to grade 3 reading comprehension. Neither relation was significant after the autoregressor. In contrast, awareness of cross-language suffix correspondences predicted individual differences in French reading comprehension, including after autoregressive controls. These findings show the importance of awareness of commonalities between suffixes across languages in enabling the development of French reading comprehension.

Multidimensional morphological assessment for middle school students

“…These studies indicate differences depending on whether one assesses morphological awareness, morphological decoding or morphological analysis. Lam, Chen, and Deacon (2020) further support this, with suffix awareness contributing uniquely to L2 reading comprehension. Clearly, an assessment of morphological knowledge must assess various morphological skills.…”

The Simple View of Reading Made Complex by Morphological Decoding Fluency in Bilingual Fourth‐Grade Readers of English

“…In particular, little research on the SVR has focused on morphological process of fluent decoding discussed earlier in this article in light of L1 versus L2 readers’ differential experience in the target language, not to mention how variation may exist between L2 readers from different L1 backgrounds, for whom the influence from prior language and literacy processing experience is naturally expected (Koda, ). Such an influence or cross‐linguistic transfer effect, in addition to being supported by interlingual correlations between L1 and L2 in diverse groups of L2 or bilingual readers (e.g., Lam, Chen, & Deacon, ), has been well documented in Koda and colleagues’ studies that compared written word recognition or lexical processing in adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) with disparate L1 backgrounds (e.g., Hamada & Koda, ; Muljani, Koda, & Moates, ; Wang & Koda, ). Those studies overall found that as compared with ESL readers whose L1 was Chinese, which uses a morphosyllabic writing system, those readers whose L1 was alphabetic (e.g., Indonesian) consistently showed a processing advantage, in terms of faster responses, in lexical decision tasks that tapped sensitivity to English letter–phoneme mapping patterns.…”

Morphological Awareness and Reading Comprehension: A Cross-linguistic Study

“…Researchers (Kuo & Anderson, 2006;Jeon, 2011;Wade-Woolley & Geva, 1999;Carlisle, 2000;Haomin & Koda, 2018; argued that recognizing morphological structure in words can be helpful to the reader in understanding the functions of unfamiliar words in reading comprehension across languages as well as within languages, and they proposed the aspect of morphological awareness transfer to be considered in studies of language learning and teaching. In reading literature, it has been suggested that morphological awareness is cross-linguistically related to reading comprehension in different languages (L1 and L2) which have similar morphological structures and noticeably different morphological structures (Ramírez, Chen, & Pasquarella, 2013;Lam, Chen, & Deacon, 2020;Vaknin-Nusbaum, & Saiegh-Haddad, 2020;Wang et al, 2006;Wang et al, 2009;Schiff & Calif, 2007). However, only a few pairs of languages have been studied so far: English and Arabic (Saiegh-Haddad & Geva, 2008), English and Korean (Wang et al, 2009), Spanish and English (Ramrez et al, 2013), and Chinese and English (Jie et al, 2010;Wang et al, 2006. For instance, among Korean students speaking English as a second language, Wang et al, (2009) investigated the cross-linguistic morphological associations with word reading and reading comprehension.…”