The Role of Morphological Awareness in Bilingual Children's First and Second Language Vocabulary and Reading

• Main Author: Ramírez Gómez, Gloria Eduviges
• Other Authors: Chen-Bumgardner, Xi
• Language: en_ca
• Published: 2009
• Subjects: reading; literacy; ELLs; morphological awareness; vocabulary; second language; skills transfer; bilingual; 0525; 0282; 0524; 0290
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1807/19160

The present dissertation research had two main purposes. The first one was to compare the development of morphological awareness between English Language Learners (ELLs) who speak Chinese or Spanish as their first language, and between these two groups of ELLs and native English-speaking children. Participants included 78 monolingual English-speaking children, 76 Chinese-speaking ELLs, and 90 Spanish-speaking ELLs from grade four and grade seven. Two aspects of morphological awareness were measured, derivational awareness and compound awareness. The results indicated that ELLs’ morphological awareness is influenced by the characteristics of their first language. While Chinese-speaking ELLs performed more similarly to English native speakers on compound awareness than Spanish-speaking ELLs, Spanish-speaking ELLs outperformed Chinese-speaking ELLs on derivational awareness. The second purpose of this dissertation was to examine the within and across language contributions of morphological awareness to word reading, vocabulary and reading comprehension in Spanish-speaking ELLs. Morphological awareness in Spanish and in English was evaluated with two measures of derivational morphology, respectively. The results showed that Spanish morphological awareness contributed unique variance to Spanish word reading, vocabulary and reading comprehension after controlling for other reading related variables. English morphological awareness also explained unique variance in English word reading, vocabulary and reading comprehension. Cross-linguistic transfer of morphological awareness was observed from Spanish morphological awareness to English word reading and vocabulary, but not to reading comprehension. English morphological awareness did not predict performance on any of the three Spanish outcome measures. These results suggest that morphological awareness is important for word reading, vocabulary and reading comprehension in Spanish, which has a shallow orthography with a complex morphological system. They also suggest that morphological awareness developed in children’s first language is associated with word reading in English, their L2. Overall, results indicate that the ability to perform morphological analysis is important for ELLs.