Role of Phonological and Morphological Awareness in Korean Sixth-Grade Students’ English Vocabulary Knowledge and Reading Comprehension

Abstract

The present study examined the roles of phonological and morphological awareness in Korean elementary school students’ vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. A total of 98 Korean sixth-grade students participated in this study and took phonological awareness (i.e., rhyme and phoneme awareness), morphological awareness (i.e., compounding, inflectional, and derivational awareness), vocabulary knowledge, and reading comprehension tests. The results revealed that phonological and morphological awareness predicted 10% and 4% of the total variance in vocabulary knowledge, respectively, and, 11.4% and 25% of the total variance in reading comprehension after controlling for vocabulary knowledge. Among the three types of morphological awareness, inflectional awareness was the strongest predictor explaining the variances in vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension, whereas derivational awareness did not explain any variance in either outcome. Such findings indicate that, for the Korean sixth-graders, the role of phonological and morphological awareness in their English vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension overlap, but morphological awareness benefits their text-level comprehension more than their phonological awareness. Several pedagogical implications are also discussed.