Morphological Awareness Matters, but for Whom Reading What? Contributions to Narrative and Expository Reading Comprehension

• In Event: Innovative Approaches to Integrating Morphology Within Adolescent Literacy Instruction

Abstract

Background

Growing research points to a relation between morphological awareness (MA; i.e., students’ ability to reflect on and manipulate words parts such as prefixes, suffixes, and roots) and reading comprehension (for a review, see Carlisle, 2010). However, far less is known about whether and how this relation differs by the text type (i.e. narrative and expository) read, especially for students from linguistically diverse backgrounds. Given that reading comprehension involves an interaction between reader, text, and activity characteristics (RAND Reading Study Group, 2002), it is likely that MA plays a greater role in reading comprehension for some readers and for some texts.

Objectives and Purpose

This study investigates the contributions of MA to English reading comprehension for Spanish-speaking language minority (LM) learners and their native English-speaking classmates in sixth grade. The research questions were:
1) To what extent does the relation between morphological awareness and reading comprehension differ by expository and narrative texts?
2) Do these relations differ between Spanish-speaking LM learners and native English speakers sampled from the same schools?

Method and Data Sources

Participants included 139 sixth-grade students (55 native English (NE) speakers; 82 Spanish-speaking LM learners). Measures included standardized tests of reading comprehension and word reading fluency and researcher-developed measures of derivational MA and academic vocabulary. Multiple regression analyses were used to investigate the relation between MA and narrative and expository reading comprehension, and to test whether this relation was similar for native English speakers and Spanish-speaking LM learners.

Results

Results indicated that MA was a stronger predictor of expository text comprehension (β= .207,p=.011) than of narrative text comprehension (β= .146,p=.045), after controlling for the effects of academic vocabulary and word reading fluency. For NE speakers, MA did not significantly predict reading comprehension for either narrative (p=.484) or expository (p= .261) texts. For LM learners, the effect of MA on comprehension was non-significant for narrative texts (β=.185,p= .055), but significant for expository texts (β= .273,p= .011). The relation for expository text? was notably strongly for LM learners (ΔR^2=.048) than for native English learners (ΔR^2=.015).

Scholarly Significance

Findings suggest that the role that derivational MA plays in students’ reading comprehension differs based on the characteristics of the texts they are reading, such that MA may be especially important for reading expository text. This study also provides evidence that the relation between MA and reading comprehension differs by language background, such that MA may be particularly important for LM learners reading expository texts. Findings raise the possibility that teaching MA may be particularly important for LM learners who struggle with the challenges of reading expository text. Future instructional research would be well-advised to take text type into account when developing instruction approaches to meet the needs of linguistically diverse learners.

Authors

• Alyssa Trzeszkowski-Giese, New York University

• Michael J. Kieffer, New York University