Unraveling Adolescent Language & Reading Comprehension: The Monster’s Data

ABSTRACT

Purpose

This study explores the roles of morphological skills (Morphological Awareness, Morphological-Syntactic-Knowledge, Morphological-Semantic-Knowledge, and Morphological-Orthographic/Phonological-Knowledge), vocabulary (knowledge of definitions, relationships between words, and polysemous meanings), and syntax in contributing to adolescent reading comprehension. Specifically, we identify the relative importance of these language skills.

Methods

A racially diverse sample of 1,027 students grades 5 to 8 were studied. Dominance Analysis was used, which allows a rank ordering of the contribution of predictors.

Results

Results suggest unique roles for each language area with particularly important roles for vocabulary and morphological awareness. Considering just morphology, four morphology skills each explained meaningful variance (13-17%) in reading comprehension, together explaining half the variance in standardized reading comprehension. Considering each language area, vocabulary, the four morphology skills, and syntax were shown to each explain meaningful variance, ranging from 9-13%, together explaining 62.9% of the variance in reading comprehension.

Conclusions

Findings are interpreted within the Reading Systems framework. Findings confirm the role of vocabulary, morphology, and syntax in supporting reading comprehension and suggest a relatively stronger role for vocabulary and morphological awareness. The meaningful role of the four morphological skills also suggests a broad role for morphology. Implications for theory, research, and practice are shared.

Author’s Note

We confirm that there is no conflict of interest for any of the authors regarding this manuscript.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the students, teachers, schools, and district that participated in this research. We would also like to thank all research team members who worked on the project, our project manager Sara McFadden, staff like Tonya Simmons who kept the project moving, and the Florida Center for Interactive Media team led by Cody Diefenthaler who put together the gaming environment for Monster, PI.

This study was approved by the Vanderbilt Internal Review Board (#150950) and conforms to recognized Standards as in the US Federal Policy for the Protection of Human Subjects as guided by the Belmont Report. The legal guardian for all participants gave their informed consent and participants gave their assent prior to their inclusion of the study.

The research reported here was supported by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, through Grant R305A150199 to Vanderbilt University. The opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not represent views of the Institute or the U.S. Department of Education.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Morphological measures were not read aloud after pilot data from year 1 indicated no significant differences on items read aloud versus provided only in print (see Goodwin et al., 2019).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Institute for Education Sciences (IES) [R305A150199].