Abstract
The present study examined the developmental relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension, using a 1-year longitudinal study with a sample of 439 Chinese-speaking students in Grades 1, 3, and 5, respectively. Children’s text reading and three components of morphological awareness: homophone awareness, homograph awareness and compounding awareness were measured. After controlling for word reading, vocabulary knowledge, IQ, rapid automatized naming and phonological awareness measured at the initial level, the structural equation modeling results indicated that children’s compounding awareness made a significant direct contribution to reading comprehension only from Grade 5 to 6. Children’s reading comprehension also made a unique contribution to compounding awareness from Grade 5 to 6. Thus a reciprocal relationship between compounding awareness and reading comprehension was found for Grade 5 to 6. Reading comprehension in Grades 3 and 5 predicted homophone awareness in Grades 4 and 6 were marginal significance, respectively, but initial homophone awareness did not predict later reading comprehension across grades. Furthermore, there no unique connection between homograph awareness and reading comprehension across grades. These findings suggest a dynamic relationship between different aspects of morphological awareness and reading comprehension in Chinese-speaking children across elementary school years.
Highlights
The ability to read and comprehend what they read is necessary skill for children to learn during their elementary school years
A longitudinal sample of Chinese students from grades 1 to 2 were assessed, and the results suggested that initial status and growth rates of compounding awareness made a significant direct contribution to reading comprehension at the end of second grade, after controlling for vocabulary knowledge, IQ and phonological awareness; the relationship between initial status and growth rates of compounding awareness and reading comprehension were fully mediated by word reading (Cheng et al, 2017)
The correlation analysis results showed that reading comprehension is significantly correlated with homophone awareness, homograph awareness, and compounding awareness at each time point of Grades 1, 3 and 5, except for the first Grade at Time 1 (T1)
Summary
The ability to read and comprehend what they read is necessary skill for children to learn during their elementary school years. One most important skill that contribute to reading development is children’s awareness of morphemes (morphological awareness) in the oral language (Nagy et al, 2003; Shu et al, 2003). The current study expands the previous research by investigating three components of morphological awareness in Chinese: compounding awareness, homograph awareness and homophone awareness (Liu and McBride-Chang, 2010; Liu et al, 2013; Cheng et al, 2017; Ruan et al, 2018) and the possible reciprocal relation between reading comprehension and each component of morphological awareness in a 1-year longitudinal design
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