Issues of Measuring Morphological Awareness Longitudinally

Abstract

Morphological awareness has been assessed longitudinally for monolinguals and bilinguals to trace the developmental trend. Researchers have found the important role it plays in literacy development including vocabulary growth and reading development. Conclusions about the important role morphological awareness play in literacy development are dependent upon valid methods. Unfortunately, some morphological awareness measurement issues have persisted in the literature. This article addressed some issues of morphological awareness assessment that persisted in the literature, which would cause inaccurate findings for studies. Twenty-six longitudinal studies that have assessed morphological awareness in Chinese and English at multiple time points have been reviewed, to investigate and address issues of measuring morphological awareness longitudinally. Four major issues were identified in the current article including the issue of high attrition and small sample size, using the same measure for multiple time points, inappropriate difficulty levels and types of the measurement used, and limitation of using one measurement. It provided several implications for future studies which could measure morphological awareness longitudinally.