The Predictive Role of Grapho-Morphological Knowledge in Reading Comprehension for Beginning-Level L2 Chinese Learners

Abstract

Reading comprehension entails a set of distinct, yet interdependent cognitive, linguistic, and nonlinguistic processes. Previous second language (L2) Chinese studies have identified significant and positive impacts of grapho-morphological knowledge at the character and subcharacter (radical) levels on passage reading comprehension; however, little is known regarding how early L2 grapho-morphological knowledge at the character and radical levels jointly predict later L2 reading comprehension. This study aimed to fill this gap. One hundred and five beginning-level L2 Chinese collegiate learners were recruited, and completed two character-related and two radical-related tasks in Week 8, as well as one reading comprehension tasks in Week 18. The main findings, based on correlational and path analyses, suggested that L2 Chinese learners’ early character-level and radical-level grapho-morphological knowledge significantly predicted later reading comprehension, yet the interrelations among grapho-morphological knowledge at the character and radical levels were complex. Path analyses identified direct and indirect paths from early character-level grapho-morphological knowledge to later reading comprehension, as well as indirect paths from early radical-level grapho-morphological knowledge to later reading comprehension. Methodological and pedagogical implications for L2 Chinese reading research and practices are discussed.

The Effect of Morphological Awareness on Lexical Knowledge of Grade 7 Learners

“…Although it was not as effective as to children, the study found out that morphology works for them too. To second language Chinese adult learners, grapho-morphological knowledge had a significant positive impact on the radical levels on reading comprehension (Chen, et. al., 2021).…”

What are the cognitive‐linguistic profiles and subtypes of Chinese adolescents with dyslexia?

“…Future studies may consider revising the instructions to ask students to fill in the blank with the 'most appropriate' words that made sense in the context and considering partial scoring methods to improve the test reliability of this task. Similar to studies conducted on Chinese adults (e.g., Chen et al, 2021;Zhang & Koda, 2021), future studies should re-examine the measure of morpheme discrimination and include a morpheme segmentation measure to capture adolescents' ability to segment and discriminate among morphological structures in Chinese words. It may be worth employing a series of morphological tasks, such as a derivation task, an affix-choice word task and an affix-choice nonword task, to improve the reliability of the tasks.…”