The contribution of morphological instruction to morphological awareness and reading: An integrative experiment on Turkish EFL learners

Abstract

The present study attempts to investigate the contribution of morphological instruction on awareness of morphology and its effects on reading. The participants were 74 freshmen studying at Translation and Interpreting Department and were distributed into experimental and control groups. The results have shown that the experimental group outperformed the control group on all four tasks of morphological awareness including root analysis, derivations and correction of affixes. On the tasks of reading vocabulary experimental group outperformed the control group again, demonstrating positive effects of morphological instruction. It is concluded that morphological treatment benefited morphological awareness and in turn, reading comprehension. The results also demonstrate that submitting an explicit treatment to the EFL learners on morphology helps them improve morphological awareness which is correlated with reading comprehension.

The Importance of Morphological Knowledge in the Reading Comprehension Difficulties in a Highly Agglutinative Language: Evidence from Poor Comprehenders

“…In contrast, Turkish is a highly transparent and agglutinated orthography. In this case, morphological and morpho-syntactic knowledge are more important for reading comprehension (Akbulut, 2019;Durgunoglu, 2003;Guldenoglu et al, 2015;Kargin et al, 2019;Lacin et al, 2018;Miller et al, 2013). Although this issue has been emphasized in many studies, the number investigating the effect of morphological knowledge on Turkish primary and secondary school students' reading comprehension skills is limited.…”

“…Turkish is a particularly interesting orthography to use for this purpose. In this language, complex words are formed by combining numerous suffixes (Akbulut, 2019). Its many iterative loops can technically produce words of infinite length using diverse suffixes and their combinations (Aydın & Yıldırım, 2017).…”