Role of morphological awareness in biliteracy development: Within- and cross-language perspectives among Korean ESL learners in grades five and six

Abstract

The study investigated the within- and cross-language contribution of morphological awareness (MA) to vocabulary and reading comprehension among students learning to read two typologically different orthographies at the same time: Korean and English. Fifty Korean ESL learners in grades five and six were administered Korean and English measures of MA (derivational and compound morphemes), vocabulary, and reading comprehension (narrative and expository texts), in addition to measures of phonological awareness (PA) and orthographic awareness (OA). Information about home language environment was also obtained from a parental questionnaire. Path analysis showed that MA was the most significant contributor to vocabulary (β=0.33, p<0.05) and reading comprehension (β=0.46, p<0.01) in English; and in Korean (β=0.62 and β=0.54, respectively, all ps<0.01), controlling for effects of PA and OA. Unidirectional cross-language transfer was found from Korean MA to English vocabulary (β=0.27, p<0.05) and reading comprehension (β=0.22, p<0.05) and multiple determining factors are discussed. Educational implications and research recommendations are also presented.