Morphological awareness and reading comprehension in a foreign language: A study of young Chinese EFL learners

This study examined foreign language learners' morphological awareness and its contribution to reading comprehension, focusing on young Chinese EFL learners. Morphological awareness measures covered inflection, derivation, as well as compounding. Results showed that the learners' basic facet of inflectional awareness was better than that of derivational awareness; their compound awareness was better than derivational awareness, for both basic and refined facets; and the advantage of compound awareness over derivational awareness was smaller for the basic facet than for the refined facet. In addition, derivational and compound awareness independently predicted English reading comprehension, over and above vocabulary and grammatical knowledge. These findings were discussed in light of the joint effects of L2 lexical exposure and first language morphological experience on L2 morphological competence, and the importance of morphological awareness to English reading comprehension.