The Importance of Morphological Awareness in L2 Prosody and Reading Comprehension

Abstract

This study investigated how morphological awareness and vocabulary knowledge and metacognitive awareness affect Korean adult learners’ second language (L2) prosody and reading comprehension. In the present study, 56 Korean adult learners of English were asked to take morphological awareness tests (i.e., morphological structure and verbal suffix knowledge) and prosody tests (i.e., stress contour discrimination and stress contour matching) and to complete a survey that showed the participants’ English proficiency based on TOEIC scores, learning experience, age of acquisition, the vocabulary knowledge and metacognitive awareness. Multiple regression analyses were conducted, and the results showed that scores of morphological awareness were more associated with L2 prosody, and scores of vocabulary knowledge, stress contour discrimination, and stress contour matching were more correlated with L2 reading comprehension. Future research is needed to investigate how L2 learners’ morphological awareness contributes to L2 prosody and reading comprehension based on pedagogical implications.