Abstract
By the end of primary school, students are confronted with expository texts known for their high proportion of domain-specific academic vocabulary words. These words usually comprise Greek or Latin roots in their internal structure. Recent findings showed that knowledge of Greek and Latin roots is related to reading comprehension. However, no study has investigated such a relationship in a francophone context. Therefore, the present study sought to measure Greek and Latin roots’ relation to reading comprehension among French 6th graders. To do so, 40 participants were administrated an experimental task on Greek and Latin roots knowledge and a reading comprehension standardized subset test. Variables related to reading comprehension, such as morphological awareness, vocabulary breadth, word reading fluency, oral comprehension, and working memory were also measured. Results showed that knowledge of Greek and Latin roots significantly predicted variation of reading comprehension. This paper discusses scientific and educational implications of this finding.
Highlights
Reading comprehension is known to be a complex ability requiring the interaction of various components regulated by working memory (Kintsch, 1998)
There were no significant correlations between reading comprehension and morphological awareness (r =.16, p = .325), and neither with oral comprehension (r = .28, p = .081)
Control variables correlated with reading comprehension were first entered in the model of the regression, and further knowledge of Greek and Latin roots was entered in the model
Summary
Reading comprehension is known to be a complex ability requiring the interaction of various components regulated by working memory (Kintsch, 1998). Even though morphological awareness has been found to be related to reading comprehension as early as the first grades, its contribution is greater by the end of elementary school (Kirby et al, 2012; Nagy et al, 2006; Singson et al, 2000) During this period, children encounter a large number of unknown morphologically complex words, in other words, comprised of two or more morphemes, in their schoolbooks. The role of morphological awareness may be more important for the comprehension of expository texts where the word knowledge becomes more crucial for text comprehension (Fazio & Gallagher, 2014; Nagy et al, 1987) These texts are comprised of domain-specific academic vocabulary (Henry, 2010). It is relevant to expect the presence of a high proportion of words composed of Greek and Latin roots in expository texts in French schoolbooks
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