Work

Roles of morphological awareness in the reading comprehension of Spanish-speaking language minority learners: Exploring partial mediation by vocabulary and reading fluency

Year: 2012

Type: article

Abstract: ABSTRACT This study investigated the direct and indirect roles of morphological awareness reading comprehension for Spanish-speaking language minority learners reading in English. Multivariate path analysis was used to investigate the unique contribution of derivational morphological awareness to reading comprehension as well as its indirect contributions via three hypothesized mediators for students in sixth, seventh, and eighth grade (N= 101). Results indicated a significant unique contribution of morphological awareness, controlling for phonemic decoding, listening comprehension, reading vocabulary, word reading fluency, and passage reading fluency. Results further indicated significant indirect contributions of morphological awareness via reading vocabulary and passage fluency, but not via word reading fluency. Findings suggest that morphological awareness may play multiple important roles in second-language reading comprehension.

Source: Applied Psycholinguistics

DOI: 10.1017/s0142716411000920

Authors: MICHAEL J. KIEFFER, GINA BIANCAROSA, JEANNETTE MANCILLA-MARTINEZ

Institutions: Columbia University, University of Oregon, University of Illinois Chicago

Language: English

Topic: Second Language Acquisition and Learning

Subfield: Developmental and Educational Psychology

Field: Psychology

Domain: Social Sciences

SDG: Quality education

Open Access status: bronze

Funders: Spencer Foundation, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation