Derivational Morphology in the Reading Comprehension of Chinese-Speaking Learners of English: A Structural Equation Modeling Study

• In Event: 70.066 - Roundtable Session 28
  In Roundtable Session: 70.066-3 - Trends in Second Language/Multilingual Reading Research

Abstract

Through Structural Equation Modeling analysis, we examined the direct and indirect effects of morphological awareness on ESL reading comprehension. With a focus on young Chinese-speaking ESL learners, we found that derivational awareness was a unique and significant predictor of ESL reading comprehension over and above the influence of learners’ lexical knowledge; it also had a significant indirect effect on ESL reading comprehension, largely through the mediation of learners’ vocabulary knowledge, but not their derived word decoding fluency.

Author

• Dongbo Zhang, Michigan State University