Roles of L1 and L2 Derivational Morphological Awareness in L2 Reading Through the Mediation of L2 Vocabulary Knowledge

Abstract

The present study aims to explore the direct and indirect contribution of L1 and L2 derivational morphological awareness of Korean EFL high school and university students to their reading comprehension in L2 through the mediation of L2 vocabulary knowledge by using structural equation modeling analysis. Eighty-five high school and eighty-two university students were assessed on their Korean L1 and English L2 derivational morphological awareness and English L2 reading comprehension and vocabulary knowledge. The results of the study present a significant direct contribution of L2 derivational morphological awareness and L2 vocabulary knowledge to L2 reading comprehension. The contribution of L2 derivational morphological awareness appeared larger than L2 vocabulary knowledge, which suggests a relatively more important role of the former than the latter in L2 reading comprehension. They also reveal a significant indirect contribution of L1 derivational morphological awareness via L2 derivational morphological awareness to L2 reading comprehension but not that of L2 derivational morphological awareness via L2 vocabulary knowledge. Findings from the study suggest potential benefits of cross-linguistic transfer of derivational morphological knowledge as well as of L2 derivational morphology intervention in L2 reading development.

The Influence of Explicit Morphological Instruction on Reading Comprehension among Malaysian Primary ESL Learners

“…Morphological decoding awareness relates to pronunciation, it concerns the ability of learners to pronounce a written word accurately based on the constituents of morphemes. This type of awareness does not have a significant association with reading comprehension (Choi, 2015;Hasan, 2016;Xue & Jiang, 2017) but Wang, Lin, and Yang (2014) reported otherwise.…”

“…Heightened morphological awareness (MA) develops higher quality mental lexical representations, and this support reading comprehension markedly (Asher, 2017;Bae & Joshi, 201;Deacon et al, 20147;Zhang, 2016). Learners can interpret and predict the meanings of complicated morphological words based on the root words and constituent morphemes (Choi, 2015;Deacon et al, 2014). Knowledge of multiple morphemic meanings and root words can significantly increase reading comprehension level (Asher, 2017;Zhang, 2016).…”

Derivational Suffixes in Crazy Rich Asians Novel: A Morphological Analysis

“…Moreover, relevant articles by (Ford, Davis, and Wilson, 2010) stated in their article mention about morpheme of the base, it is related but in this discussion not used visual lexical. Another article that shows the suffixes are productive in word formation by the process of derivational morphology (Fleta, 2011;Choi, 2015) However, there are some articles that focused on one type of suffix that is derivational forming noun (Puspita, 2013;Sari, 2017;Manggala, 2018) and derivational forming adjective in newspaper article with the main theory used is proposed by Quirk (Jayanti, 2016). In addition, related articles that discussed the morphological suffix more broadly, including inflectional and derivational was Nurtiddini & Soraya (2019).…”

Conceptualization of Morphological Awareness and Productive Vocabulary Knowledge with Academic Writing

“…Many previous studies were focusing on the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension or word reading. In a study conducted by Choi (2015), the researcher aimed to investigate how direct or indirect an awareness of L1 and L2 derivational morphology was contributing to L2 reading comprehension through the vocabulary knowledge mediation. The three kinds of derivational morphological knowledge (syntactic, relational, and distributional), as categorized by Kuo and Anderson (2006), were assessed in this study by using the word segmentation task, sentence grammatical judgment task, and the word production task respectively.…”