Contribution of Morphological Awareness to Reading Comprehension for Spanish-English and Chinese-English Bilingual Children

• In Event: Exploring Heterogeneity, Discourse, and Linguistic Awareness in Multilingual Literacy Learning

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between derivational morphological awareness and reading comprehension among Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilingual children in grades 4 and 5. First, we attempted to examine a theoretically driven hypothesis on the differences in derivational morphological awareness among Spanish-English and Chinese-English bilingual children. Based on the linguistic distance effect (Koda, 2008), cross-linguistic transfer occurs such that metalinguistic awareness developed in the first language (L1) can be transferred to the second language (L2) reading development, and such cross-linguistic transfer is stronger when two languages are typologically close than distant. Spanish is relatively linguistically close to English in morphology, because they share large overlaps in derivational structure, whereas Chinese is linguistically distant from English because a small number of Chinese words are made of derivational affixes relative to compounding. Thus, we hypothesized that Spanish-English bilingual children would score higher on derivational morphological awareness compared with that of Chinese-English bilingual children. Second, we further tested the application of this theory in whether home language group moderated the relationship between morphological awareness and reading comprehension across linguistically diverse students. We hypothesized a positive interaction such that derivational morphological awareness would be more predictive for Spanish-English bilingual children than for Chinese-English bilingual children.

In this study, we recruited 171 linguistically diverse students with 56 Spanish-English bilingual students and 115 Chinese-English bilingual students from grade 4 and grade 5 in New York City, New York. In the sample, 57% students were in 4th grade (N= 97, Mean(age)=10.11) and 43% were in 5th grade (N= 74, Mean(age)=11.07). Additionally, there were 67% (N=115) Chinese-English bilingual children and 33% (N=56) Spanish-English bilingual children. Participants were assessed on a battery of English measures including derivational morphological awareness, word reading, vocabulary, and reading comprehension. Results from the t-test analysis showed that Chinese-English bilingual students (M=232.86, SD= 11.41) outperformed Spanish-English bilingual students on English derivational morphological awareness (M=224.20, SD= 11.91); t(169)=4.59, p < .001). The effect size was large for the difference in means of derivational morphological awareness between the two groups (d= .748). Further, interaction analyses accounting for clustered standard errors (for classrooms) indicated that bilingual students’ home language statistically significantly interacted with English derivational awareness in predicting English reading comprehension. Contrary to the linguistic distance hypothesis (Koda, 2008), derivational morphological awareness predicted reading comprehension more strongly for Chinese-English bilingual students than Spanish-English bilingual students (β = - 0.17, p < .01). One possible explanation can be related to students’ conscious attention to the forms of morphological structure (Schmidt, 1990). Advanced readers may begin noticing morphological structures that are not mutually shared between the home language and target language explicitly instructed in the class. Thus, Chinese-English bilingual students may be directed to put more mental effort into learning English derivational morphology that is dissimilar to their home language. These findings shed light on theoretical models of the role of morphology on reading comprehension in bilingual children. Moreover, uncovering the mechanism of the reading process between structurally distinct languages can inform researchers about reading comprehension development of linguistically diverse students.

Authors

• Xiaoying Wu, New York University

• Michael J. Kieffer, New York University

• Patrick Proctor, Boston College